Sudan: Repatriation

(asked on 27th April 2023) - View Source

Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to their response to the Foreign Affairs Committee report, Missing In Action: UK Leadership And The Withdrawal From Afghanistan, published on 18th July 2022, what ‘fundamental lessons’ they agreed they needed ‘to learn and to act on’ from the experience of UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 and the events which followed it have been applied to the evacuation of British citizens and diplomats from Sudan in April 2023.


Answered by
 Portrait
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
This question was answered on 15th May 2023

Following the Afghanistan response in August 2021, the FCDO conducted a lessons learning exercise, as is standard practice after a crisis. It focused on the FCDO crisis response systems, structures and ways of working. The FCDO is implementing the recommendations. The Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) conducted a detailed enquiry, to which the then Foreign Secretary and I gave oral evidence and responded to requests for written information on the evacuation. A summary of the lessons learned was shared with the FAC in March 2022. The FAC published the Government's response to the FAC's report in July 2022. The FCDO Management Board reviewed progress in January and an update was shared with the FAC on 8 February. Those lessons learned have been applied to subsequent crisis responses on Russia/Ukraine, the Turkey and Syria earthquake and Sudan.

Reticulating Splines