Nicholas Soames: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what steps he is taking to push for the updating of the definition of combatants and non-combatants in the Geneva Conventions. [155022]

Mark Simmonds, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs: The British Government are committed to upholding the Geneva conventions and encouraging others to do the same. We are not pushing for the conventions to be updated. We judge that the current priority is to improve implementation of existing international humanitarian law including the Geneva conventions, rather than the creation of new law.

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