Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what steps his Department has taken to address the number of executions by beheading in Saudi Arabia.

Ministers, our Ambassador, and the Embassy team raise the issue of the death penalty with the Saudi authorities, bilaterally and through the European Union. While we are fully committed to global abolition, we must recognise that the total abolition of the death penalty is unlikely in Saudi Arabia in the near future. For now, our focus is on the introduction of EU minimum standards for the death penalty as a first step, and supporting access to justice and rule of law.