Germany risks being seen as an unreliable defense partner if it extends its Saudi Arabia arms embargo, Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned.

Britain and France say the German weapons ban, enacted in October 2018 and due to last until the end of March, stops them selling jointly developed technology to Riyadh.

Merkel has come under pressure from her coalition partners at the Social Democratic Party, who advocate for a stricter set of arms export regulations. The Chancellor told the German parliament that sometimes “we eventually have to be ready to compromise some of our convictions.”

“In reality, because the UK has a strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia, we’d been able to play a very important part in making the Stockholm talks happen,” said Britain’s foreign minister Jeremy Hunt said last month. “And we don’t believe that changing our commercial relationship with Saudi Arabia will help that, in fact, we worry that it would do the opposite – it would reduce our influence on that process.”

[Source: The National]