Matthew Offord – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Matthew Offord on 2016-01-07.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, with reference to page three of the HMG Strategy for Abolition of the Death Penalty 2010-2015, as revised in October 2011, what legal challenges to the mandatory death penalty his Department has been involved in involving (a) UK citizens and (b) non-UK citizens in each of the last five years.

Mr David Lidington

Using a range of funding tools, principally the Human Rights and Democracy Programme Fund, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has, since 2010, funded a number of non-governmental organisations to mount legal challenges to the use of the death penalty abroad both in specific cases and on matters of general principle. We do not fund the private legal costs of British nationals facing the death penalty, but we can refer cases to the FCO’s pro bono legal panel, where appropriate, to provide advice to the British national in question and their local lawyer on an entirely pro bono basis.