MPs debate Corbyn’s act on parliamentary approval for military action overseas (WATCH LIVE)
MPs have gathered for the second emergency debate on Syria this week, where they will discuss the right of parliament to approve military action before it is launched.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said there is an “urgent” need to discuss MPs right to approve planned military action.
The Opposition leader said the convention to consult parliament is being “tossed aside as as simply inconvenient” and that the “government’s actions [this weekend] clearly demonstrates why parliament must assert its authority on this subject.”
It comes after Corbyn branded Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to intervene alongside the US and France in Syria “legally questionable.” He hit out at the Tory leader for failing to seek parliamentary approval before authorizing the missile strike against Syria’s leader Bashar Assad in the early hours of Saturday morning.
He said the PM should be “accountable to this parliament, not to the whims of the US president,” before he discredited May’s claim that the strikes were carried out to alleviate human suffering in the war-torn Middle East country.
Corbyn will call for a new War Powers Act, legislation aimed at making it mandatory for parliament to approve military action before it is launched.
May announced early on Saturday that she had decided to side with the US and France in their launching of airstrikes against three chemical-weapons sites in Syria. The joint intervention came in retaliation for an alleged chemical-weapons attack that reportedly killed 70 people in the formerly rebel-held town of Douma, Eastern Ghouta.
Syria has rejected the allegations, but NATO considers Assad responsible for the April 7 attack.
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