To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, with reference to paragraph 4.5 of his Department's consultation response, Public consultation on the United Kingdom's future legal framework for imposing and implementing sanctions: government response, published in August 2017, if he will make it his policy to publish annual reviews of autonomous UK sanctions regimes after the provisions of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill come into force.
Answered on
15 November 2017
We fully appreciate the importance of effective scrutiny of sanctions policy. The Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill requires any adoption or amendment of sanctions regulations to be scrutinised by Parliament. As set out in our response to the consultation, and in clause 26 of the Bill, the Government will conduct an annual review of whether each UK autonomous sanctions regime remains appropriate for its purpose. We envisage this as an internal policy review rather than a report for external publication.