Oral Answers to Questions

Fabian Hamilton Excerpts

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Burt]

The United Kingdom continues to work very closely with all parties to ensure that special envoy Martin Griffiths has the necessary space. We are in constant contact; I spoke to the Deputy Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates yesterday and spoke to the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister just this morning to urge the maximum support for the negotiations, and we have spoken to other parties who have an opportunity to make representations to others involved in the conflict to do exactly the same.

[Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)]

Last week’s United Nations expert panel report on Yemen completed before the bus bombing of 9 August said that the Saudi coalition was routinely ignoring its own no-strike list of 30,000 civilian sites. Surely that is the very definition of indiscriminate bombing. In light of that, how can the Government continue to claim that there is no clear risk that the arms we sell to Riyadh are being used to violate international humanitarian law?

[Alistair Burt]

The particular report that has been brought forward is not accepted in full by the coalition, and there are some elements of it that the UK does not accept, so we are looking at that more carefully. The important thing is—the hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct on this—that international humanitarian law must be adhered to, but the practices of the coalition that have developed over the conflict to ensure proper investigation should anything go wrong are far more developed than they were. Nobody wants to see such investigations because nobody wants to see the actions that have caused them, and that is the UK position.