Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, whether his Department has made representations to the Government of Burma on allowing the UK team of experts on sexual violence to visit Myanmar to assist the investigation into alleged rapes of ethnic Rohingya women by police and soldiers in Rakhine State.

We have not made representations to the Government of Burma specifically on allowing the UK team of experts on sexual violence to visit Myanmar. Our recent focus has been on co-sponsoring the Resolution at the Human Rights Council in March which established a Fact Finding Mission to assess human rights abuses, including those of sexual violence in Rakhine. We urge the Burmese authorities to cooperate with the Mission as agreed by the Human Rights Council. We stand ready to support the Mission in any way we can. We will also continue to raise issues of conflict-related sexual violence with the Burmese authorities bilaterally.

The Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my noble Friend, the Rt Hon. Baroness Anelay of St Johns, raised these issues with Burmese Ministers when she visited Burma in November 2016 in her capacity as the Prime Minister's Special Representative on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict. She also called on the Burmese authorities to investigate allegations of sexual violence in a thorough and transparent manner.