(5 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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The UK offers full support to Martin Griffiths’ UN-led process as well as the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In April, the Yemen Quad reaffirmed its endorsement of the agreement reached in Stockholm by Yemeni parties in December 2018. We have previously seconded an individual to the UN to support the work of the executive mechanism for agreement on prisoner exchange. Obviously we welcome the very welcome news of the release of prisoners that we have seen in the past few days, but there is clearly more that needs to be done on all sides.
I have lost count of the number of times in the four years that I have been here when we have discussed Yemen in this Chamber, yet little or nothing has changed, so let me ask again a question I first asked in 2016 and is sadly still relevant: what does a regime have to do—how many breaches of humanitarian international law does it have to commit—before this Government deem it an unacceptable partner with which to deal arms?
The UK takes its exporting licence obligations extremely seriously. We operate one of the most robust export control regimes in the world.