Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent representations he has made to his Chinese counterpart on the treatment of human rights activists in that country.

Ministers regularly raise the treatment of human rights activists directly with the Chinese authorities.

I discussed human rights, including our concerns about human rights lawyers and activists, with the Chinese Assistant Minister for Europe, Liu Haixing on 16 February during my visit to China. The Foreign Secretary, my Rt Hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), also raised human rights issues with Chinese State Councillor Yang Jiechi at the UK/China Strategic dialogue on 20 December 2016. We discussed the full range of our human rights concerns and individual cases directly with the Chinese authorities at the latest round of the UK/China Human Rights Dialogue, which I opened on 27 October 2016.