3-Letter to the Parliamentary Relations
and Devolution Team, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, from the
Clerk of the Committee
At its meeting on 1 November, the Committee
considered the Government's response to its Report on East Asia.
I have written to you on a number of points arising from that
response.
There is one particular point I have been asked
to raise separately. In response to the Committee's recommendation
about the EU arms embargo on China, made in paragraph 134 of its
Report, the FCO states that "We agree with the Committee's
assessment that the value of the embargo is now mainly symbolic."
The Committee has asked me to point out that
its Report contained no such assessment. In fact, it was the FCO's
own memorandum of evidence to the inquiry that described the embargo
as being "of largely symbolic significance." The Report
quoted this, as well as the opinion of two witnesses to similar
effect, but at no point did the Report state or even suggest that
the Committee shared that assessment. The closest the Committee
has come to making such an assessment was in the Report of the
Quadripartite Committee of August this year, which referred to
the embargo as having "a symbolic value." That statement
is a good deal less forceful than the one wrongly ascribed to
the Committee in the response.
Steve Priestley
Clerk of the Committee
8 November 2006
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