Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, whether he has made an assessment of the potential merits of (a) enabling Parliament to exercise oversight of sanctions policy and (b) imposing a duty on His Majesty's Government to lay an annual report before Parliament on sanctions and other related measures adopted on the basis of a relevant human rights purpose as defined by the Sanctions and Money Laundering Act 2018 Section 1(f).

UK sanctions regimes are established through secondary legislation and are subject to Parliamentary oversight via the scrutiny processes set out in the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 ("SAMLA").

Ministers are also routinely held accountable for the UK's sanctions policy through select committees and Parliamentary Questions. The government will shortly publish a Post-Legislative Scrutiny Memorandum for SAMLA, following the publication of the UK's first sanctions strategy in February 2024.

In 2022, Parliament amended SAMLA to streamline some of the processes SAMLA originally established, including for reporting.

We have set out the UK government's approach to using sanctions as a foreign and security policy tool in our strategy published on 22 February (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/deter-disrupt-and-demonstrate-uk-sanctions-in-a-contested-world-uk-sanctions-strategy). The strategy explains how we continue to strengthen our sanctions to deter and disrupt malign activity and to protect the UK.