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Somalia

The United Kingdom is very active on the provision of increased prison places in the country and the region. The Department for International Development is helping to fund the construction of three prisons; in fact, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development has been to see the construction of one of them, so we are involved in that. My hon. Friend is right about the fishing issue. The Minister for Africa—the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (Mr Bellingham)—and I have been engaged in encouraging the transitional federal Government in Mogadishu to claim their exclusive economic zone, and we will encourage their successors do the same, because that will give them the necessary rights to the waters off Somalia. They will, of course, then need a coastguard, naval and maritime capability of some kind to enforce those rights, but, as I mentioned earlier, that is one of the issues we also want to address. These things are therefore part of the longer-term solution to piracy, and my hon. Friend is quite right to ask about them. I was just listing some of the aims of our conference. We intend to make it harder for terrorists to operate in and out of Somalia. We hope the conference will agree the areas we need to develop to disrupt terrorism across the region, including stopping the movement of terrorists to and from Somalia, disrupting the flow of their finances and supporting the Somali criminal justice sector so that it can detain and prosecute terrorists in a human rights-compliant manner.