Speech

Foreign Secretary meets Jordanian Foreign Minister

William Hague praises UK-Jordan relationship, and calls on international community to do more to help Syrian refugees and host communities.

This was published under the 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government
Foreign Secretary William Hague and Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh

The Foreign Secretary William Hague today met the Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh. Speaking at a press conference after the meeting, the Foreign Secretary said:

I am delighted to welcome back to the FCO my friend, His Excellency Nasser Judeh, Foreign Minister of Jordan. We agreed that the excellent British-Jordanian relationship is as strong as ever. I congratulated him on Jordan’s election to the UN Security Council and for taking up the Presidency of the Council in their first month; the UK will give any assistance it can. I also expressed my condolences on the sad death of a Jordanian peacekeeper in Darfur on Sunday, which is a reminder of the important Jordanian contribution to UN peacekeeping and to global peace and security. As such, Jordan will be a very important and valuable addition to the Security Council over the next two years and we look forward to working closely together in New York.

We held discussions on two of the most urgent foreign policy issues facing the region and indeed the world. On Syria, I paid tribute again to the extraordinary generosity demonstrated by Jordan, along with Syria’s other neighbours, as they bear the huge burden of dealing with the flow of Syrian refugees. The international community needs to match that generosity. As the British Government, we have already pledged £500 million in humanitarian aid, more than we have given for any previous humanitarian crisis. This includes over £109 million to support refugees and host communities in Jordan. Both Britain and Jordan are encouraging other countries to follow this lead at the Kuwait conference next week.

The Foreign Minister and I agreed that the unrelenting pressures on Syria’s neighbours, and the terrible suffering of the Syrian people, will only be relieved by a political resolution to the conflict and that is why we both fully support the Geneva II process as it looks to implement the Geneva communiqué of 2012 and create a transitional governing body in Syria in which in our view Assad can play no part.

We also discussed our full support for the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and paid tribute to the efforts of US Secretary of State John Kerry and his team. We welcomed the continued commitment of both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships. I briefed Foreign Minister Judeh on the unprecedented package of security, political and economic support that the European Union will provide to the parties in the event of a final status agreement. We agreed that Jordan and the Arab League have an important role to play in supporting the process in the coming months, and that our two countries would stay in close contact on this issue.

Further information

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Published 9 January 2014