Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their estimate of the current holdings of banned chemical agents by the Assad regime; and whether they have held any discussions with the government of Russia concerning the accuracy of those estimates.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is responsible for verifying Syria's Declaration and destruction of its chemical weapons programme under the Chemical Weapons Convention. Four years after Syria’s accession to the Convention, the Director General reported “gaps, inconsistencies and discrepancies remain” in the Declaration, and an absence of credible evidence to account for quantities of agent Syria possessed, the type of agent and the munitions used for delivery. The OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism has also confirmed Syrian regime use of chemical weapons four times since its accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013. This is a flagrant breach of the convention. Syria’s retention of a chemical weapons capability cannot be in doubt.

The UK has been active in highlighting the importance of action at the OPCW, at the UN and more widely to put an end to the possession and use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime and building international consensus to that end, engaging Russia accordingly both bilaterally and in key multilateral fora.