ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So then, there are signs this weekend of some hope in the Middle East. The UN has agreed to send a team to observe the ceasefire in Syria and Iran has agreed to further talks on its nuclear programme so has the region turned a corner? Well I’m joined now by the Foreign Secretary William Hague, a very good morning to you Mr Hague, let me ask you first of all about Syria. With this handful of UN monitors going in, do you have much confidence that this Kofi Annan formed plan will ultimately lead to a lasting peace?

WILLIAM HAGUE: Well it’s very early days for this plan so people are quite right to be sceptical about in particular the intentions of the Assad regime, a regime that used the period up to this ceasefire to continue to kill, torture and abuse people in their own country. It’s very difficult, it’s impossible to place any trust in them, nevertheless this is an advance. The resolution that we’ve succeeded in passing at the United Nations yesterday, Resolution 2042, is quite important because it means the whole Security Council, including Russia and China, have put their weight behind this and it means it spells out the terms on which the monitors are now heading for Syria will do their work there, that they must have unimpeded access, be able to talk privately and confidentially to whoever they wish to, that their security will be protected and if that is all upheld, a much larger monitoring force will follow in due course. So it is a step forward but only a step.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Yes, because in your own words, the Assad regime is doomed. Now that plan doesn’t mention anything about the future of the regime and we certainly know that the Russians don’t think so.

WILLIAM HAGUE: Well the plan does include, the six-point plan of Kofi Annan, does include a political process, a political process involving a more plural democratic system ultimately in Syria, so this is part of the plan and the Assad regime now has to engage with that, it has to show willing, to have a political process, to continue to implement, to more fully implement a ceasefire including pulling back armed forces from populated areas, if it is not now to be in breach of a UN Security Council resolution. So while it remains a phenomenally difficult situation and of course there will always be a danger at any time of the ceasefire breaking down or not being fully implemented by the regime, nevertheless this is better than the situation we had over the last few weeks of huge numbers of people being killed every day.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Indeed but Foreign Secretary, you could interpret that plan with the need for engagements with the Assad regime changing, engaging in those talks, bringing in meaningful reforms and remaining, that’s very different from your interpretation that it is doomed.

WILLIAM HAGUE: Yes, it is. Clearly the Annan plan requires, it relies on all involved being able to have some confidence in what might happen in the future and therefore it is ambiguous about what will ultimately happen. It wouldn’t work as a plan put forward to the regime and to the opposition unless that was the case. My own view is that the Assad regime has behaved in such a way, killed so many people, lost so much credibility with its own people as well as the international community, that it cannot survive. It can’t survive a more democratic system in Syria and it wouldn’t survive if it just engaged, if it continued to engage in the violent repression of its own people, it would ultimately fall so that certainly remains my view but the best way forward is the Annan plan, it has brought about a ceasefire of a kind and now the monitors are going in. This, as I say, is far better than any alternative scenario at the moment which involves much more death and violence.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, that’s the real politic of it, but if it were left to you, given the murderous response over twelve months and more by the Assad regime, wouldn’t you like to see Assad and other members of that regime arraying before the International Criminal Court, facing charges there if captured as happened in Libya?

WILLIAM HAGUE: Yes, of course I would and I mentioned last weekend that if this ceasefire had not come in to force and this resolution had not been passed then one of the next things that Britain would have done would have been to put forward the case for a reference to the International Criminal Court. We would have to get that through the UN Security Council and of course with the position of Russia and China that is a very difficult thing to do but what we’ve been doing in the absence of that is helping to assemble the evidence – I’ve sent teams of people to the borders of Syria to help assemble the evidence, to document the crimes that have been committed so that one day there can be a day a reckoning, one day there can be a day of justice for the people of Syria. So Britain is very actively busy with that process.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, we’re hearing those UN monitors are on their way now, I mean they can’t achieve much can they, six monitors? Presumably you’d like to see that beefed up a lot.

WILLIAM HAGUE: Yes, it will have to be beefed up. The initial provision in the UN Resolution is for 30 monitors to go, obviously they will go in stages and this number of people cannot possibly effectively monitor what is happening in the whole country but of course they can go to the most difficult places, they can go quickly to anywhere where there is a reported breach of the ceasefire provided they have the unimpeded access, the freedom of movement and communication that is laid down in the UN Resolution and then, as I say, the plan will be for a much larger, more in the hundreds of monitors, to follow them provided the Annan plan is being implemented by all concerned. So yes, it’s a small group to begin with but it can be followed by many more.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay and just before we move on to Iran and get your response to those talks getting underway, that have got underway about its nuclear programme, can I ask you about Bahrain because you’ll be aware that the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights looks at the international community’s response to events in Libya, to your response today and over the months to Syria and says well what about us? The situation is still desperate here, there are flagrant abuses of human rights going on here and yet people like the Foreign Secretary in Britain say nothing about it.

WILLIAM HAGUE: Well of course we don’t say nothing about it, we say a great deal about it and we have regularly condemned human rights abuses in Bahrain and called on all involved, just as we call on them in other countries, to engage in a political process together, to solve their problems peacefully. The situation in Bahrain though is different from what we’ve just been talking about in Syria, in the case of Bahrain the King of Bahrain established an independent international commission of respected people to report on human rights abuses in Bahrain, they were allowed freely to publish that report, the government has set about implementing some of the recommendations of that report although some of it requires coming to agreements with opposition forces in Bahrain, so that is a radically different situation from the behaviour of the Assad regime, we have to be clear about that but yes, there have been human rights abuses, those are unacceptable, we take them up whenever they occur and I’ve recently been remonstrating with the government of Bahrain about the man who is on hunger strike at the moment and putting the case to them for him to be allowed to go to Denmark since he is a dual national, so we are busy all the time with Bahrain, we are not saying nothing about it.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay but still content for British arms companies to sell them as much as they like?

WILLIAM HAGUE: Well no, that’s not our policy with many countries in the world. We have a licencing system in the United Kingdom, we have the European Union criteria for the sale of defence goods or arms, whatever we want to call them, and they go through that strict licencing system and we have, in the case of Bahrain, revoked many licences last year when the trouble there began.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: To Iran, Foreign Secretary, and Baroness Ashton the EU Foreign Affairs Chief reported back from the opening salvos in the talks over its nuclear programme, said they were constructive. What do you interpret about that? Is that diplomatic speak for we basically said hello and there’s a long way to travel?

WILLIAM HAGUE: There is a long way to travel and it would be a mistake to be starry eyed about talks with Iran. All attempts at talks have foundered in the past because of the impossible conditions that Iran has set during them, nevertheless the atmosphere in yesterday’s talks was more positive than in previous attempts at negotiations and that means it is possible to go forward to a second round of talks next month. As I say, we should not get over-excited about that but we are serious about the negotiations with Iran, just as we are serious about sanctions on Iran. We have imposed unprecedented sanctions on Iran and their oil sales. We are also serious in this twin-track approach, sanctions with negotiations, about a meaningful negotiation that ends with Iran having a civil nuclear power programme if that is what they want but not a nuclear weapons programme. S we will make a continued and very serious effort at this and the talks began better than on previous occasions. I don't think we can go further than that at the moment.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay and lastly, Foreign Secretary, can I just ask you about the big issue or one of the big issues domestically for the government, this issue of philanthropic donations, the cap on how much very rich people can give. A lot of charities saying they are going to suffer, a lot of universities saying they are going to miss out on donations, do you have sympathy with their view?

WILLIAM HAGUE: Well the Prime Minister said this week that we’d look very sympathetically at such concerns and indeed the Treasury has said all along that they would listen to and they would work with charities and philanthropists to look at any impact on charities that rely on big donations so they have started on that work, they have had some of the meetings on that already. Nevertheless, remember the important point here which is as the Chancellor pointed out in his budget speech, that some people have used charitable giving in order to reduce their tax bill to almost nothing. That is not acceptable in the eyes of the country, in the eyes of the government but finding a solution that takes account of the concerns that are being expressed, that is something that the Chancellor and the Prime Minister have said they’re open to.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: But do you agree that it all seems, David Davis said this morning that it all seems to run a bit counter to the Big Society message?

WILLIAM HAGUE: Well that would depend on its impact. I think it’s important to point out so that people aren’t misled by the arguments about this, that the vast majority of charitable donations are completely unaffected by this change. This is only about people on very large incomes making very large charitable donations and in some cases they have made them to charities that are abroad, that may not be what you and I consider as a charity so clearly this had to be tightened up and clearly the Chancellor is moving very much in the right direction in announcing measures on this so I think everybody ought to be able to agree on that but yes, there are concerns from some charities about some donations that they might be affected. Well the Treasury are looking at that, will continue to look at that, the Prime Minister says we will listen very sympathetically and I think that’s the right position.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Foreign Secretary, thank you very much, good to talk to you. William Hague there.

WILLIAM HAGUE: Thank you.