Mr Hamish Falconer

I congratulate the hon. Member for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber (Brendan O’Hara) on opening this debate and on his contribution as the chair of the APPG. I thank every Member who has spoken with such clarity and conviction. These are incredibly important questions at a moment when questions of international justice are very much discussed, so I hope hon. Members will forgive me if I really do insist on accuracy in these questions. To answer the question straightforwardly, as I did at length on 15 September in front of the Business and Trade Committee, the British Government have conducted an assessment on the risk of genocide in accordance with our international legal obligations. As I said yesterday, or the day before, from this Dispatch Box, we consider our international legal obligations to be of the utmost priority. Many hon. Members have asked me to attend to my conscience over the course of the last 90 minutes. I am confident that I, the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister and the Government as a whole are serious about our international legal obligations and serious about the process and rigour that underpin them. I have confidence in that judgment not only because of the extensive scrutiny that it has received from the House, but because these questions have been tested by our own courts—most recently by the Court of Appeal in November and before that in September, when it considered the process of assessment explicitly.