LONDON (Middle East Eye) – British Prime Minister Liz Truss has been accused of misleading the UK parliament after telling MPs she raised human rights issues in meetings with Persian Gulf leaders as foreign secretary in Boris Johnson’s government.
In a letter sent to Truss, Chris Bryant, a Labour MP, said she had failed to provide any examples of human rights issues she had raised during visits to the Persian Gulf despite telling the parliamentary foreign affairs select committee she had personally done so when quizzed on the matter by Bryant in June.
Asked then to provide examples, Truss told Bryant she would not go into details of private conversations but would write to the committee with details.
But, according to Bryant, in a follow-up letter to the committee she cited only a meeting in December 2021 with Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) foreign ministers at Chevening House, an official government residence traditionally used by the foreign secretary, at which “a wide range of issues were discussed, including human rights”.
Bryant said Truss, the foreign secretary from September 2021 until she succeeded Johnson as Conservative Party leader and prime minister earlier this month, had failed to cite a single instance when she had personally raised human rights with Saudi Arabia or any other GCC state, and accused her of “attempting to pull the wool further over our eyes”.
He wrote: “In the absence of an explanation or an apology for your inaccurate comments at the Committee, it is difficult not to conclude that you have deliberately misled the Committee, because you did not want to own up to the fact that you knew that you had never raised these issues with Persian Gulf states either in the Persian Gulf or at home.”
Bryant said he was “mystified” why Truss had “refused to raise human rights concerns with Saudi Arabia, especially considering its sponsorship of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and its execution of 81 people on a single day”.
Asked by Bryant in June whether she considered Saudi Arabia responsible for the killing of journalist Khashoggi, who was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, Truss said: “What I would say is that Saudi Arabia is an important partner of the United Kingdom.”