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Sri Lanka

My Lords, let me tell the noble Lord one very good piece of news. The last remaining young hunger striker today suspended his hunger strike and has been taken to hospital. More broadly, there has been a welcome by those outside to the visit of the Foreign Secretary and to the efforts of my right honourable friends the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary to address this issue and this crisis with the vigour that we have. We have sought to do what we think is proper in terms of the humanitarian case that we have made in Sri Lanka and what is proper in terms of British national interests. We have sought to communicate intensively with the British Tamils outside here in terms of those objectives. Equally, we have tried to take pains not to allow British policy to somehow be held hostage to these demonstrations. The critical thing has been to do what is right.