A family in Yemen is concerned that US drones are trying to assassinate them without charge or trial, international human rights group Reprieve has found.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has announced that Jeremy Fleming will take over GCHQ, the UK intelligence gathering agency that has been directly implicated in assisting covert US drone strikes in countries including Yemen.
An attack on a village in Yemen ordered by President Trump caused the death of a newborn baby, alongside as many as 23 civilians, the human rights organisation Reprieve has discovered.
The Obama Administration has reversed its position on which countries will be included in its upcoming estimate of the civilian deaths caused by the US drone programme, according to a report in the Washington Post.
An influential committee of Parliamentarians has called on the British Government to “urgently” clarify its legal position on drone strikes, warning that its policy “may expose…Ministers to the risk of criminal prosecution for murder.”
It has emerged that the British government is directly involved in the covert US programme in Yemen, including secret drone strikes, despite having denied such involvement for several years.
Members of the UK’s Parliamentary intelligence watchdog will not be allowed access to all intelligence or defence information relating to the new British practice of targeted killing by drone, the Prime Minister has said.
The Attorney General has refused to say if the government has a ‘blanket’ or ‘case-by-case’ policy on targeted killings in countries with whom the UK is not at war.
The UK government has told the UN that striking ISIS in Iraq is legal justification for drone strikes in Syria, despite David Cameron's earlier claim of pure UK ‘self-defence’.