Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what the Government's priorities were for the 54th Special Session of the OPCW Executive Council on 13 and 19 April 2017; what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of the outcome of those meetings; and if he will make a statement.

The UK’s priority for the recent session of the OPCW Executive Council was to make clear international condemnation of the 4 April Khan Sheikhoun attack and to confirm our support for the OPCW investigation which began immediately following that attack. We welcome the Executive Council’s overwhelming vote on 20 April to reject a Russian-Iranian proposal which would have distracted from and undermined the OPCW expert investigations which are already under way. We will continue to support the work of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission and the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism.