Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, how many experts recruited under the prevention of sexual violence initiative are deployed to the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Six members of the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) Team of Experts have been deployed to Bangladesh to date by this Department in support of survivors of sexual violence among Rohingya refugees. These experts have been deployed, for example, build the capacity of others, including through training on gathering and preserving evidence of sexual violence in line with the International Protocol on Investigation and Documentation of Sexual Violence in Conflict. There are 37 people in the PSVI Team of Experts, who have a range of skills, such as Criminal Lawyers, Gender Based Violence Experts and International Investigating Officers. However, they do not themselves collect evidence or investigate sexual violence, since gathering evidence without a mandate may damage prospects of successful prosecutions. These deployments form part of the UK’s wider £129 million humanitarian response to the crisis.