Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether UK officials have met with any Chinese officials in the last 12 months who have been sanctioned by the US.

The UK did not invite the Governor of Xinjiang to visit and under no circumstance would he have been offered a Ministerial meeting. The scale and severity of human rights violations in Xinjiang is harrowing and the UK government consistently raises our concerns with Beijing at the highest levels. The Foreign Secretary did so with his Chinese counterpart on 20 February. As Minister Docherty stated in the debate on 9 February, relevant FCDO Ministers were made aware of the possible visit in the usual way, after officials were notified by the Chinese Embassy in January. Ministers agreed that officials should be prepared to offer a meeting to make clear the UK's abhorrence at the treatment of Uyghur people and to reiterate that we will not relent from exposing China's unacceptable human rights violations. No UK official has met Chinese officials sanctioned by the US over the last 12 months.