Lord Hylton – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Hylton on 2016-01-25.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the action they and their allies can take to enable the UN agencies in Syria to carry out their mandates fully and freely.

Baroness Anelay of St Johns

The UK has played, and will continue to play, a leading role in ensuring that UN agencies are able to carry out their mandates in Syria. Through our membership of the UN Security Council and as part of the International Syria Support Group we helped generate a mandate for the UN Special Envoy for Syria to launch intra-Syrian peace negotiations this month. We have also co-sponsored a series of UN Security Council Resolutions (UNSCR) on humanitarian issues, including most recently UNSCR 2258 on cross-border humanitarian access. These resolutions provide a mandate for the delivery of aid into Syria.

We are deeply concerned about the restrictions placed on UN agencies to deliver these mandates, particularly the obstructionism and lack of response from the Syrian Regime to repeated requests from the UN for humanitarian access to towns and regions across Syria. We regularly raise these issues in the UN Security Council.