Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made, if any, of the concerns expressed by hunger strikers protesting at the prison conditions of Abdullah Öcalan; and what assessment they have made of the need to resolve the Kurdish–Turkish conflict.

​We are aware of the concerns expressed by hunger-strikers around the isolation of Abdullah Öcalan. Similar concerns were also considered by the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) in their report, published in March 2018, of their April 2016 visit to the prison in which Mr Öcalan is held. We encourage Turkey to adopt the CPT's recommendations. With regard to the decades of conflict in Turkey, we have consistently urged an end to PKK violence and for both sides to return to a peace process. PKK violence has cost the lives of some thousand members of the Turkish security forces and scores of civilians since July 2015.