Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to help support (a) women and (b) political prisoners under threat from the Iranian regime.
We continue to support women and political prisoners in Iran through sustained action alongside international partners in multilateral fora. In the past eight months, the UK was integral to the delivery of two Iran human rights resolutions. The first, adopted by the UN Third Committee in November 2024, condemned Iran's intensified and targeted repression of women and girls, and called on Iran to immediately and unconditionally release persons arbitrarily detained for the exercise of their human rights and fundamental freedoms, including human rights defenders, journalists and all those who remain under detention for taking part in peaceful protests. The second, adopted by the Human Rights Council in April 2025, renewed the mandate of the Special Rapporteur, and renewed and expanded the mandate of the Fact-Finding Mission to investigate a wider breadth of violations, and to establish the facts, circumstances and structural causes of such violations, including discrimination on grounds of gender and political views. Our Ambassador to Iran and I continue to raise human rights directly with the Iranian Government.