North Africa and the Middle East

Thomas Docherty Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

Operations have been directed against military forces or against the command and control of those forces. As my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary always stresses in our meetings, we take the greatest care to avoid civilian casualties, and there have been no confirmed civilian casualties caused by coalition activities so far. We do everything we can to minimise the risks of that. Certainly, the air strikes and missile strikes that we have authorised are on military targets—on air defence systems, on forces that are threatening the civilian population of Libya, or on the command and control of those systems. Those are all wholly legitimate targets.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

Given the vital nature of sustaining the coalition, may I press the Foreign Secretary to clarify for the House how often meetings of the coalition will take place, and at what level?

[Mr Hague]

As I mentioned earlier, there is a regular meeting in Brussels between contributing nations—representatives of the countries involved. Many of those are, for instance, permanent representatives to NATO. That takes place all the time. We are also, at a ministerial level, in daily touch across the coalition through telephone calls and visits from one country to another. The conference that we will host in London on Tuesday is at the broadest level—the highest strategic level—to look at future stabilisation and humanitarian questions, as well as at what is going on in Libya now. I assure the hon. Gentleman that all those things together form a mass of consultation and involvement—with daily conversations with the Arab League, for instance. The Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), and I speak to Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, pretty much every day. There is extensive consultation.