Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of state sponsored human rights abuses in the Cameroon after the reported shooting of a four year old girl by a gendarme in the Anglophone South-Western region of that country; and what discussions they have had the governments of (1) Cameroon, and (2) France, regarding this.

Following the shooting of the four-year old girl in Buea, the British High Commission in Yaoundé issued a statement condemning the act, welcomed an investigation by the Cameroon Ministry of Defence, and raised the incident directly with the Cameroonian Government. The UK works regularly with international partners, including France and the US, to raise the crisis in multilateral fora. At the UN Human Rights Council in March, we called for an end to violence and for impartial investigations to hold the perpetrators of human rights violations and abuses to account. The UK has also funded training to improve human rights reporting and better protect human rights defenders in Cameroon.