Lord Grade of Yarmouth

The Government announced in October 2019 that it will not commence the age verification provisions of Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 and instead deliver these protections through our wider online harms regulatory proposals.

Protecting children is at the heart of our plans to transform the online experience for people in the UK and the strongest protections in the online harms framework will be for children. All companies in scope will be required to assess whether children are likely to access their services, and if so, provide additional protections for children using them. Through the online harms framework, we will be able to go further than the Digital Economy Act’s focus on online pornography on commercial adult sites. We will be able to protect children from a broader range of harmful content and activity, across a wider range of sites.

Under our proposals, we expect companies to use age assurance or age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing services which pose the highest risk of harm to children, such as online pornography. The online harms regime will capture both the most visited pornography sites and pornography on social media, therefore covering the vast majority of sites where children are most likely to be exposed to pornography. Taken together we expect this to bring into scope more online pornography currently accessible to children than would have been covered by the narrower scope of the Digital Economy Act.

The Department is regularly in discussions with other countries on a wide range of COVID-19 issues, including Israel, to share learnings and collaborate internationally on the vaccination programme. Feedback from these discussions, where relevant, is used to improve the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines in the United Kingdom.

The Government has assessed the case for a single holistic infections strategy and agrees with the need to closely align work on antimicrobial resistance, sepsis, future infections threats and pandemic preparedness. This has culminated in the publication of Public Health England’s PHE Infectious Diseases Strategy 2020-2025: Addressing urgent threats in the 21st century outlining priorities to reduce the risk of and burden from all infectious diseases including resistant infections, infections that can lead to sepsis, endemic infections, vaccine-preventable infections, and infections of pandemic potential, and bringing them together as a single strategic framework. A copy of the Strategy is attached.

While the Infectious Diseases Strategy does not address sepsis strategy directly, it is critical that our work on sepsis and anti-microbial resistance (AMR) is closely aligned. Sepsis forms an important part of NHS England and NHS Improvement’s AMR programme, which will continue to drive improvement in the prevention and management of infection and optimal antibiotic use.

The FCDO strongly values the work of the BBC World Service and its independent and impartial broadcasting. FCDO officials are working closely with the BBC to consider how best to support BBC services to the Russian people.

We condemn the persecution of current and former BBC Persian employees and their family members, and the many individuals who have had their assets frozen or are banned from leaving Iran. We regularly raise this issue of harassment directly with the Iranian government, as well as in multilateral fora. At the UN Third Committee in October 2020 we urged Iran to cease their harassment of journalists and media organisations, and at the Human Rights Council in March 2021 we made it clear to Iran that their repeated violations of human rights are unacceptable. We reiterated our concerns on 24 June 2021 at the BBC Persian event, attended by multiple supporters of media freedom, which took place alongside the Human Rights Council. These actions by the Iranian authorities contravene multiple international human rights obligations, and we will continue to call them out for as long as they commit them.

The UK remains committed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA), a reciprocal deal that lifts sanctions in exchange for tough nuclear limits. Iran has broken the nuclear limits in the JCPoA and we are working to bring Iran back into compliance through the deal's Dispute Resolution Mechanism.

UNSCR 2231, which underpins the JCPoA, includes a number of clauses designed to allow sanctions to expire on fixed dates: the UN conventional arms embargo is due to expire in October 2020. We have repeatedly set out concerns about Iranian destabilising behaviour, including proliferation to non-state actors. We are consulting partners on the broader implications of the UN arms embargo expiry and encourage all states to implement national export control best practice.

As part of those consultations, we are taking into account sanctions regimes that will remain in place after the arms embargo expires, such as UNSCRs 1540, 1701 and 2216, which prohibit the proliferation of weapons to Lebanese Hizballah and the Houthis. The EU arms embargo and UN ballistic missile restrictions on Iran will also remain in place until 2023. Separate to sanctions in place under the JCPoA, there is an EU Iran human rights sanctions regime. It places trade restrictions on specified goods and technology which may be used to repress the civilian population of Iran and on specified goods and technology which may be used for interception and monitoring services in Iran. These EU trade restrictions do not have an expiry date.