Stephen Doughty – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Doughty on 2016-05-24.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, when he made his most recent assessment of UK compliance with (a) the Cluster Munitions Convention, (b) the Arms Trade Treaty and (c) the EU Consolidated Arms Export Criteria.

Mr Tobias Ellwood

a) The UK provides an annual report to the Secretary-General of the UN on its compliance with the CCM. The UK submitted its last report on 29 April 2016. It completed destruction of its stockpile of cluster munitions in December 2013, more than 5 years ahead of the schedule set by the Convention.

b) The UK has signed and ratified the Arms Trade Treaty and is applying its standards through implementation of robust and transparent national export controls of all conventional arms and ammunition. As part of its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty, the UK recently submitted its first annual report (covering 2015) to the Treaty Secretariat ahead of the 31 May 2016 deadline.

c) Each year the Government submits a report to Parliament on the UK’s Strategic Arms Export Controls. The most recent report, covering 2014, was published on 23 July 2015. The Government considers that it complies fully with the Consolidated Criteria.