INTRODUCTION
1. The Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) is one of
the departmentally-related select committees of the House of Commons,
which scrutinise the expenditure, administration and policy of
government departments. In the case of the FAC, this scrutiny
is exercised over the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and
the agencies for which the FCO's Ministers are accountable to
Parliament: the British Council; BBC World Service; and the Wilton
Park conference centre.
2. In the calendar year 2004, the Committee met formally
on 35 occasions; it heard oral evidence from 90 witnesses (some
of them on more than one occasion); it visited 13 countries overseas;
and it held 64 informal meetings with visitors to the United Kingdom,
ambassadors to the Court of St James and others. The Annexes to
this Report give more detail on these visits and meetings. As
in previous years, a number of the Committee's Reports were debated
or referred to in Parliament.[1]
3. In this Report we adhere to the practice we have
adopted in previous years, of presenting our work under the following
headings: Continuing scrutiny of foreign policy; Scrutiny of specific
foreign policy issues; Scrutiny of Foreign and Commonwealth Office
publications; Pre-legislative foreign policy scrutiny; and Other
scrutiny activities. We also relate our work to the wider parliamentary
process of scrutiny of the policies and actions of the executive;
we comment on the responses of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
(FCO) to our Reports, and on its wider relationship with the Committee;
and we preview our future programme. We also seek to demonstrate
how the Committee's work relates to the 'core tasks' identified
by the House's Liaison Committee.[2]
1 See para 59 below Back
2
See Annex 1 Back
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