© AFPSmoke rises from an air attack in Taiz earlier this month.
The UK government is obliged to issue all its public reports before the end of the parliamentary year, but to avoid scrutiny from MPs, the government now regularly withholds any potentially embarrassing reports until the very last day of that session. It can then release them safe in the knowledge that there will be no time left for MPs to examine them, and no opportunity to question ministers over them.
So having issued very little information over the preceding weeks, as MPs were heading back to their constituencies, the government took the opportunity to release dozens of reports and ministerial statements detailing everything from cuts to police, to the revolving door between cabinet ministers and private corporations, to the millions in legal fees the government spent attempting to prevent parliamentary scrutiny of Brexit.
Buried deep among them was a Foreign Office report on the state of human rights in 30 countries deemed to be of "priority concern". What makes the report embarrassing to Britain, however, is that 20 of these countries are major customers of British arms exports, with Saudi Arabia, of course, topping the list.
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