Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what discussions his Department has had with the Government of China on the use of the death penalty in that country.

The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and we continue to urge the Chinese authorities to reduce their use of the death penalty and provide details of the numbers of executions in China. We last raised these concerns at the UK-China Human Rights Dialogue in October 2016, which I attended.

Through our network of diplomatic posts, the UK is working with Chinese legal experts and the Chinese judiciary to support legislative and judicial reforms to limit the use of the death penalty. We have welcomed reductions in the number of crimes that attract the death penalty, and the Supreme People's Court mandatory review of all death sentences.