“Minister, I have a question which is going to annoy you.” The warning came during a January 20th 2019 interview on French national radio station France Inter with France’s defence minister Florence Parly.

Interviewer Ali Baddou stared at the minister and, raising his voice slightly, asked: “Should there be a halt to weapons sales to Saudi Arabia?”

It was a subject that had been asked over several months, but which had met with no official response. Yet the issue of arms contracts between France and Saudi Arabia is part of a demanding moral, political and legal debate: should France supply weapons to a client who has been using them, over the past four years, to bomb civilians in Yemen?

On March 26th 2015, at the head of a coalition with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and eight Arab states with a majority Sunni Muslim population, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered a series of attacks by air and sea against targets in Yemen. The objective was to defend the ruling Yemeni regime against a military offensive launched by the country’s Houthi movement, from Yemen’s Shia Muslim minority, and which is supported by Iran.

Today, the country is gripped by what the United Nations (UN) has described as “one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world”. Many among Yemen’s population of more than 28 million continue to face aerial bombing raids by the Saudi-led coalition which, according to statistics from the Yemen Data Project, an independent NGO that researches and cross-checks data on coalition strikes, have already killed more than 8,300 civilians, including 1,283 children.