Speeches

Fiona Bruce – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Fiona Bruce on 2016-05-03.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what representations he has made to the People’s Republic of China on that government’s proposed new law on control of foreign non-governmental organisations.

Mr Hugo Swire

We have longstanding concerns about the new law, which we made clear to the Chinese authorities through an EU letter on 4 June 2015. We have also fully supported the EU’s other actions in expressing concern about the law, including various written representations and its Item 4 statement at the Human Rights Council in March. I set out our views to the Chinese Ambassador in June last year and we raised the matter at Ministerial level during the UK-China People-to-People Dialogue in September 2015. We fully support the recent EU statement of 4 May.