Asked by: Debbie Abrahams (Labour - Oldham East and Saddleworth)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what assessment he has made of the (a) adequacy and (b) speed of the covid-19 vaccination roll out in India to Indian-administered Kashmir.
Answered by Nigel Adams
The UK continues to monitor the response to Covid-19 globally, including in Kashmir. The FCDO is working with global institutions, including the World Health Organisation, to ensure supplies are directed to those in greatest need. We are monitoring information on supplies in both India-administered and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Asked by: Debbie Abrahams (Labour - Oldham East and Saddleworth)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what assessment he has made of whether the TRIPS waiver proposal at the WTO that would suspend global patent rules during the covid-19 pandemic will enable the scale-up of manufacturing required to make enough doses to vaccinate the world.
Answered by Wendy Morton - Shadow Minister (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
The UK does not consider waiving intellectual property (IP) rights to be an appropriate action to boost the manufacturing of safe, effective, and quality vaccines. The existing intellectual property framework has mobilised research and development to deliver a host of new medicines and technologies to detect, treat, and defend against COVID-19. We have not yet seen evidence of how such a waiver of IP rights would improve the current situation. The UK continues to engage in constructive and evidence-based discussions at the TRIPS Council on the waiver proposal, and to address the multiple factors outside of IP on which access to medicines depends.
The UK is among the biggest global donors on COVID-19, and committed to supporting rapid, equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. We have pledged over £1 billion of UK aid to counter the health, humanitarian, and economic risks. To support global vaccine access, we have funded a range of international organisations with the expertise to deliver an 'end to end' approach from research, development, and clinical trials, through to supporting manufacturing scale-up and delivery.
Asked by: Debbie Abrahams (Labour - Oldham East and Saddleworth)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of the decision to reduce the Official Development Assistance budget at the 2020 Spending Review on (a) levels of international migration and (b) global peacebuilding.
Answered by James Cleverly - Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government
As announced on Thursday 26 November, in order to maximise our strategic focus in the use of Official Develolpment Assistance (ODA) next year, the Foreign Secretary will lead a short cross-government process to review, appraise and finalise all of the UK's ODA allocations. Decisions on support for international migration and global peacebuilding will be taken as part of this process and based on assessments of need, and evidence of where UK ODA can make a difference.
Asked by: Debbie Abrahams (Labour - Oldham East and Saddleworth)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of the level of white-supremacist violent extremism in Ukraine.
Answered by Wendy Morton - Shadow Minister (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
There are several peripheral groups with neo-Nazi sympathies in Ukraine, some of which have made statements in support of white supremacism. We take seriously any reports of violent extremism and hate crime in Ukraine.
The UK is committed to pursuing a comprehensive human rights agenda in Ukraine, including taking action against racially-motivated hate crime. Since 2014, the UK has co-sponsored a UN resolution supporting quarterly debates of reports on Ukraine by the Monitoring Mission of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The UK Government provides financial support to the Monitoring Mission, which works to report and reduce human rights violations and abuses in Ukraine.
Whilst Ukraine has cooperated fully with the Monitoring Mission, we remain extremely concerned by the restrictions of access for human rights bodies to the non-government controlled areas of eastern Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea, and the resulting limited reporting on those areas. It is essential that independent investigations take place to deliver accountability for serious allegations of hate crime in all of Ukraine. We will continue to work closely with the Ukrainian government, our international partners and local agencies to support efforts to report, investigate and reduce incidences of hate crime in Ukraine.