Hilary Benn – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Hilary Benn on 2016-01-19.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, how many full-time equivalent staff in his Department were employed to work on human rights in 2014-15; and what the cost of these employees was to the public purse.

Mr Philip Hammond

As I said in my published article marking Human Rights Day, human rights work "is the responsibility of all British diplomats". Calculating the proportion of each UK diplomat’s time spent on human rights work, and their associated cost, would incur disproportionate cost.