‘Threshold not crossed’: Boris Johnson denies Saudi bombing massacres in Yemen breach int’l law

“So far, we do not believe that there has been a clear risk of a breach of the international humanitarian law,” Johnson told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show, referring to the Saudi actions in Yemen and adding: “At the moment, we do not think the threshold has been crossed.”

The foreign secretary then reaffirmed the British allegiance to the Arab kingdom by saying that the UK is “supportive” of Saudi Arabia and has a “longstanding partnership” with it, as he defended the British government’s policy of selling weapons to the Arab country.

He went on to say that the actions of Saudi Arabia are justified and even supported by the UN. “There is a campaign supported by the Arab League, by a vast coalition, supported by the UN to move Houthis out of Sanaa and restore the legitimate government,” Johnson said, referring to the Yemeni Houthi rebels who forced President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to go into exile and seized large swathes of Yemeni territory, including the Yemen’s capital of Sanaa in 2014 after Shia President Ali Abdullah Saleh was deposed in 2012.

However, the UN has blamed the Saudi Arabia-led coalition’s airstrikes for the majority of civilian deaths in the Yemeni conflict, and called for an international investigation in August, citing allegations of breaches of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in Yemen.

A report released by the Yemen Data Project in September concluded that one-third of Saudi airstrikes hit hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets across the country.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told the Guardian at that time that those figures were “vastly exaggerated,” and blamed Houthi fighters for turning civilian buildings into “command control centers” and “weapons depots.”

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