Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of placing an arms embargo on Azerbaijan until it complies with international legal obligations relating to (a) Nagorno-Karabakh and (b) the right of return for Armenians.

The UK warmly welcomes the recent progress made by Armenia and Azerbaijan towards peace, as summarised by the joint declaration made by their respective leaders in Washington on 8 August. I visited Baku and Yerevan on 25 and 26 August respectively and met with President Aliyev and Prime Minister Pashinyan to discuss our support for the recent agreements and to upgrade our relationships to strategic partnerships with both countries. Export licence applications for Azerbaijan are assessed on a case-by-case basis against the UK's Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, and licences are not issued where doing so would be inconsistent with these criteria, and wider policies. We continue to keep our wider policies under review.

We have called for Azerbaijan to provide clarity on the rights and security of ethnic Armenians who wish to return to Karabakh.