The UK risks violating international law through its support of lethal US drone strikes around the world, including sharing intelligence to help identify targets and the use of RAF bases, according to a report by Amnesty International.

The human rights organisation says UK is in danger of finding itself in breach of international human rights obligations. This can only increase with Donald Trump’s expansion of drone killings and the ditching of boundaries, however minimal, observed by the Obama administration.

The report, published on Thursday, says: “The UK’s approach, therefore, seems to be one which grants a wide margin of discretion to the US government, despite the extremely problematic nature of the US drone programme and the legal basis (or lack thereof) under which it is conducted.

US air wars under Trump: increasingly indiscriminate, increasingly opaque Read more

“Amnesty International is, therefore, of the view that the UK is providing significant assistance to the USA in the knowledge that this could assist potentially unlawful drone strikes.”



The 86-page report, Deadly Assistance: The Role of European States in US Drone Strikes, is to be presented on Monday as a contribution to an inquiry by the all-party parliamentary group on drones.



Amnesty says: “Four RAF bases in Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire are heavily implicated in the deadly drone attacks.”

The UK also has drone pilots embedded with the US military at a base in Nevada.



Kate Allen, Amnesty International’s UK director, said it is known that GCHQ, the UK’s surveillance agency, is feeding information to the US that is used to launch deadly drone operations in the Middle East and Africa.



“What we don’t know is how often is British intelligence being weaponised by the USA’s secretive drones programme, what are the rules and is the legality of the strikes ever questioned,” she said. “We need a full public inquiry into the UK’s shadowy role in drone attacks by the USA.”

The human rights organisation does not oppose the use of armed drones as long as they are in compliance with international law. Its concerns cover the legality of such killings, the high number of civilian casualties, and the accuracy and reliability of surveillance and intelligence information used to identify targets.

The report cites Germany, Italy and the Netherlands along with the UK in sharing intelligence that allows the US to locate potential targets for drone attacks. The UK, Germany and Italy also provide operational support, including use of their military bases.

US drone strikes have taken place in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Syria and areas outside of armed conflict. Between 773 and 1,551 civilians are estimated to have been killed.



Amnesty sent summaries of its findings to the UK, German, Netherlands and Italian governments but only Germany and the Netherlands responded. The Netherlands insisted it did not cooperate with unlawful targeted killings, while the German foreign ministry said it can only share information relating to the intelligence services with Germany’s parliamentary committees and those communications were secret.

Amnesty credited Edward Snowden, the former NSA worker turned whistleblower now living in Russia, for disclosing the extent of intelligence sharing between the US and UK and other countries.

The report concludes that secrecy around the US drone programme and the UK’s role in it means Amnesty International is unable to say definitely whether the UK is assisting unlawful US drone strikes or violating international law. This makes it “more important than ever for the UK government to urgently provide public clarification on the safeguards it has in place to ensure the UK is not aiding and assisting in potentially unlawful US drone strikes,” said Amnesty.