Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are their criteria for identifying countries of concern in the FCO annual report on human rights and democracy.

In the 2014 Foreign and Commonwealth Office Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy, we continued to use the criteria published in the 2012 report to determine whether a country should feature as a country of concern:

• the gravity of the human rights situation in the country, including both the severity of particular abuses and the range of human rights affected;

• whether a deterioration or improvement in the human rights situation in the country would have a wider impact in the region;

• whether the human rights situation in the country has an impact on wider UK interests; and

• whether we are able to influence the human rights situation there.