‘In Geneva today, at the new review of the conventional weapons treaty, the British government will be using the full force of its diplomacy to ensure that civilians continue to be killed, by blocking a ban on the use of cluster bombs. Sweden, supported by Austria, Mexico and New Zealand, has proposed a convention making their deployment illegal, like the Ottawa treaty banning anti-personnel landmines.

But the UK, working with the US, China and Russia, has spent the past week trying to prevent negotiations from being opened. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Most of the cluster bombs dropped during the past 40 years have been delivered by Britain's two principal allies - the US and Israel - in the "war on terror". And the UK used hundreds of thousands of them during the two Gulf wars.

The numbers of cluster bombs deployed are mind-boggling.

The US air force released 19m over Cambodia, 70m in Vietnam and 208m in Laos. Over much shorter periods, the US and the UK dropped some 54m cluster bombs on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf war and around 2m during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Israel scattered 4m cluster bombs over Lebanon during its latest invasion earlier this year, almost all of them during the final 72 hours. It looked like revenge, or an attempt (like its deliberate bombing of the Jiyeh power plant, causing a massive oil spill) to cripple Lebanon's economy. Since the invasion, more than two Lebanese civilians have been blown up by cluster bombs each day on average.’

Britain Is Determined To Protect Its Right To Kill Civilians At Random