David Taylor

I share the delight of my Syrian friends that Assad has gone. I only wish that the world had acted to support the Syrian people sooner, and that our dear friend Jo Cox was around to see this. I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln (Mr Falconer), for meeting the Syrian British Consortium in Doha over the weekend, and I look forward to a further meeting with him and the group in due course. Despite the denial and downplaying of Assad’s crimes over the years, including by some Members of this House, it is undeniable that hundreds of thousands of people have been imprisoned by Assad, including in Saydnaya prison. There is an urgent need to release those prisoners. Some of them are several storeys down, and there are reports on the ground that people are unable to free them at the moment, such are the electronic locks that have been put on the gates. The White Helmets are on the ground, trying to unlock the gates so that people can be freed, but there is a real worry that they will not get to them in time, and that people will starve, or even run out of oxygen. What can the British Government and the international community do to ensure that, in the next 24 hours, more is done to get technical support on the ground, so that we can unlock the doors and free the political prisoners?