"Arms sales to Israel: France's Thales supplying equipment for armed drones since 2018,"

... [Thales] is one of the signatories of the United Nations Global Compact who pledge, among other things, “not to be accessory to human rights violations”.

But Thales, in which the French state is the majority shareholder, seems to utterly flout this rule. This is what Disclose’s investigation can reveal based on 12 invoices issued between 2018 and 2023 to two Israeli arms industry heavyweights, Israel Aerospace Industries and Elbit Systems. According to these business documents, Thales sold them operational support systems for €2m for armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These are not average drones but Heron TP and Hermes surveillance and attack UAVs, two models which have allegedly been used against Palestinian civilians for almost 15 years.

When contacted by Disclose, the company confirmed the sale of components to “Israeli entities” while qualifying the impact of the “airborne communication systems” because, it wrote, they are “not lethal”. Yet transponders and collision avoidance radars are essential to operate devices which may indeed be used to kill...

Has the equipment been used for UAVs deployed by the Israeli military? When contacted by Disclose, Thales would not respond. Neither did the armed forces ministry, nor the Secretariat-General for national defence and security. Thales says that both authorised the exports...

Yet something should have prompted Thales to display increased vigilance long before 2023. Elbit Systems sold equipment to Thales for at least €200,000 between 2019 and 2020, and Israel Aerospace Industries sent Thales electronic parts for close to €310,000 in 2020. In other words, the two Israeli companies also supply products to Thales. The French group demands from all its partners that they apply “the human rights principles” of the UN Global Compact. Do Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries qualify for a derogation from the rule? When contacted, Thales’s PR department did not respond. Neither did its two suppliers.

The French justice system could now hold the European defence leader to account. Clara Ernst Mollier, a lawyer with Ancile*, says that Thales’s deliveries in Israel  “raise questions regarding its implementation of its duty of care obligations”. Under a 2017 law, the group needs to prevent human rights abuses in its supply chain, failing which it may be prosecuted.