Kirsten Oswald – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Kirsten Oswald on 2016-04-27.
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, if he will establish a treatment programme to support the rehabilitation of young Yazidi and other women.
Mr Tobias Ellwood
The UK is committed to supporting the victims of Daesh’s brutality. Through our Human Rights and Democracy Fund we are supporting a project that offers survivors of sexual violence, including from the Yezidi community, access to health and psychiatric support. This project plans to reach 2,400 women across Erbil, Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, Dohuk and Zakho. We have also translated the International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict into Kurdish, to build further the capacity of Kurdish human rights, justice and healthcare professionals to respond to and document these crimes.
We are providing £750,000 to help implement Iraq’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security to support women’s involvement in conflict resolution and the response to gender-based violence. More widely, the UK is providing £79.5 million to the humanitarian response in Iraq. This assistance is reaching hundreds of thousands of people across the country, including the most vulnerable groups, such as Yezidis. All UK-funded aid is distributed on the basis of need, regardless of race, religion and ethnicity.
