Counter-Daesh Campaign: Iraq and Syria

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Boris Johnson]

My hon. Friend raises an extremely good point. As I mentioned to the House a few weeks ago and repeated just now, the UK has launched a campaign, working with our partners, to bring to justice the Daesh terrorists, the perpetrators of violence and crimes against humanity. As I said before, the mills of justice grind slowly but they grind small. We are assembling the evidence, supporting NGOs in the gathering of evidence and working with our partners to establish exactly what legal mechanism would be most suited to bringing those people to justice.

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

This statement is about Daesh, but the Foreign Secretary has quite rightly not held back his words condemning Assad’s brutality to his own people. In line with the campaign by the Daily Mirror to save Aleppo, which I am sure the right hon. Gentleman supports, will he come back to this House as soon as possible with a comprehensive British-led strategy to protect civilians in Syria?

[Boris Johnson]

I pay tribute to the long-standing commitment that the hon. Lady has shown to this cause. I will give the undertaking that she asks for, in the sense that we are working on that the whole time. The House will have heard me explain before that some options commend themselves to people in a slightly glib way—we talk about no-fly zones or no-bomb zones—and they sound easier than they are, but as I am sure the hon. Lady will know, there are other things that we could and should be doing. We can do them only in a coalition of international partners, and, as the Prime Minister rightly said at the October European Council, no option is off the table.