Boris Johnson plans Saudi Arabia visit to seek oil supply increase
Boris Johnson is facing scrutiny over a planned trip to Saudi Arabia to push for an increase in oil output amid an outcry over the regime’s biggest ever mass execution and growing fears the prime minister may try to limit media scrutiny of the visit.
Downing Street would not confirm Johnson’s likely trip to Riyadh, but sources have said he wants to appeal to the Gulf state to increase its oil output to replace supplies from Russia.
MPs registered their deep concern after Saudi Arabia’s execution of 81 men on Saturday. Crispin Blunt, a backbench Conservative MP, secured an urgent question in the House of Commons, saying it represented “a new low for human rights and criminal justice in the kingdom, only a week after the crown prince had promised to modernise its justice system”.
Julian Lewis, the Tory chair of the Commons intelligence and security committee, called on the government to make sure that in seeking to replace energy from Russia with oil from Saudi Arabia it did not create a “dependency on another unreliable and sometimes hostile regime”.
Johnson’s official spokesperson said: “The UK is firmly opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances, in every country, as a matter of principle, and we routinely raise human rights issues with other countries including Saudi Arabia and will be raising Saturday’s executions with the government in Riyadh.”
There are also human rights concerns over Saudi Arabia’s role in the war in Yemen, after years of leading a coalition against Iran-backed rebels. More than a dozen UN agencies and international aid groups said on Monday that 161,000 people in the war-torn country were likely to experience famine over the second half of the year –– a fivefold increase.
Opposition MPs were even
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