ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now if you wanted to create a caricature of a despotic regime, it would probably look a lot like North Korea. The country’s leader, Kim Jong-un makes threats almost every day now but how seriously should we take them? Well in a moment I’ll be speaking to the Foreign Secretary, William Hague. Let’s say a very good morning to the Foreign Secretary William Hague, he joins me now from North Yorkshire and first of all Foreign Secretary, the issue of North Korea and how seriously we should take them. Is the Americans cancelling their own missile test a sign that they are taking this seriously?

WILLIAM HAGUE: I think that is a sensible thing to do, as was the cancellation by South Korea of a live fire test. One of the dangers here is of a miscalculation and of the North Korean regime coming to believe their own paranoid rhetoric so I think that sort of action by the United States is sensible. We have to take this seriously, this is a regime developing its nuclear weapons in contravention of all international treaties and resolutions, it is developing longer range missile technology and it engages in proliferating military technology to other countries, it tries to make money out of doing this at the same time. So we have to take all that very seriously but our response should also be very clear, very united and calm at all times because it’s important not to feed that frenetic rhetoric that we’ve seen over the last few weeks and to be clear that North Korea has a choice. It has got a strategic choice and at the moment the choices it is taking will lead it to being a broken country isolated from all of the rest of the world and it needs to make a different choice, one of greater opening up, that would actually do something for the people of North Korea who have been so long oppressed.

DM: And in the Foreign Office’s estimation, how much of an international military threat are they? The Prime Minister almost seemed to be suggesting last week that there is the potential of a direct military threat to Europe and indeed the UK, is that real?

WH: Well they are an example of what happens if countries break out of the non-proliferation treaty that aims to restrict the possession of nuclear weapons in the world. They claim to have missiles that can hit the United States, all of the United States, or that they will have them in the future. If they did so, well most of the Europe and the United Kingdom would be within their range as well so it is an illustration of how it is very important in the future decades to keep our own ultimate line of defence and to have a successor to the Trident submarines. It is an illustration of that but it is important also to stress that at this moment we haven’t seen evidence of redeployment and repositioning of troops on the ground, all the evidence is that this rhetoric is about the regime in North Korea justifying its actions and its existence rather than preparing for all-out conflict on the Korean peninsula or elsewhere.

DM: Let’s just be clear about this, that linking with Trident and the Prime Minister did that with a like for like replacement which we know your party favours. In all truth, if the North Koreans did resort to the use of a nuclear weapon, if they had one and they had a delivery system, it would be the Americans who would deal with them would it not?

WH: It is absolutely important to stress, you’re quite right, that the country with the strong military role, the Western country with the strong military role in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula is the United States, not the United Kingdom but what we’re seeing here is that countries that signed up to the non-proliferation treaty are attempting to develop nuclear weapons, you’ll be aware and your viewers will be aware that we’ve had negotiations, unsuccessful negotiations, with Iran over its development of nuclear technology just in the last couple of days. There is therefore a danger over the coming decades that more countries will develop nuclear weapons, that some of those countries will be countries that might miscalculate or try to use the existence of nuclear weapons in an aggressive way and therefore having our own ultimate defence, as well as our allies having theirs, is part of [break in transmission] … DM: … international debates, there are bigger fish to fry so to speak and I know that there’s going to be [break in transmission] …

WH: … tension and as I say, we mustn’t feed every day the frenetic rhetoric or respond each day to the rhetoric that they come out with. We do have a huge range of desperate international problems, the situation on Syria where there are now more than 1.2 million refugees and more than five million people in desperate need of assistance is the most pressing of all. The Prime Minister will be discussing it with other leaders during this week and I will be hosting the G8 Foreign Ministers, including the Russian Foreign Minister, in London so we will have another discussion with Russia to see if we can find a diplomatic and peaceful solution to the crisis in Syria. All our efforts to do that so far have failed and that’s why we have been increasing the help we give to the Syrian opposition to help save lives. I have also invited key Syrian opposition leaders to London this week and will be having discussions with them.

DM: And can I just ask you about one particularly worrying dimension of the Syrian conflict, I was reading about it last week and I know it is an issue you were going to raise at that G8 meeting, the issue of sexual violence as an instrument of war.

WH: This is something I feel absolutely passionate about, I’ve launched a personal and global initiative this year to combat sexual violence in conflict. This is the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, it’s happening in the Syria conflict, it happened in Bosnia twenty years ago, it happened in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo that I visited ten days ago. We can do something about this, we can end the culture of impunity, we can gather evidence and see that prosecutions take place and I want to see other countries agree with us that such crimes constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Convention and therefore bring international justice to bear on them. So Syria is very, very relevant to this as you say.

DM: A couple of other international issues I want to raise with you, first and foremost the issue at the moment of Afghan interpreters who are working for British forces there who have given many years of loyal and dangerous service. Will they have, will the UK grant them the blanket and automatic right to come and settle in the United Kingdom if they fear for their safety when UK forces withdraw?

WH: Well we do have responsibilities to these people, we have discussed within the government how to deal with this and we will be having further discussions so I can’t give you a final, a conclusive decision about this. We do think that it’s important, while protecting people and giving people the chance of course to lead a safe and secure life, it’s also important to keep able people in their own country because after all we don’t want thousands of people who have worked with the NATO coalition, with the international forces in Afghanistan, all to leave Afghanistan when the whole point is that that country should be able to maintain its own security and run its own affairs.

DM: We understand that but these are a specific group of Afghan interpreters and helpers who have worked cheek by jowl very loyally with British forces, some of whom may feel that their lives or their families lives may be endangered when they lose the protection of British forces. Should they not be afforded then the protection of the United Kingdom?

WH: Well it’s not just interpreters actually, there are other people of course who have worked very closely with the British forces and international forces so it is a larger group you have to think about here than just interpreters, although they are a very important group and have done wonderful work for us. So we do have to weigh very heavily exactly the point that you make but we also have to weigh heavily the best thing of all is for people who have worked with us and people who are extremely able to build a strong future for Afghanistan, not all leave and so we are considering, we are weighing up what is obviously a difficult issue and we will make an announcement about this when we’re ready to do so.

DM: Okay, Foreign Secretary, about Bulgaria, we’ve got a quotation here, I’m sure you’re aware of it, from TV and newspaper interviews that the British Ambassador to Bulgaria has been giving saying ‘I hope Bulgarians will always be confident about the opportunities to go to Britain. We are an open country and there will be no discrimination.’ That sounds like an encouragement to come here.

WH: It’s a clear statement of our position. The transitional controls that the UK has imposed on Bulgaria and Romania, along with many other countries, do come to an end at the end of seven years, as is well known, as the Prime Minister has made clear in his speech just within the last couple of weeks, we are also very clear that this country isn’t going to be a place of benefit tourism. We don’t want people to come here to exploit our benefit system and we’re going to take action which makes it much harder for people to do that, so we’re very clear about that but we’re also clear about our international treaty obligations. There is free movement within the European Union, many British people take full advantage of that and Bulgarians will be able to do so as well.

DM: Yes, but shouldn’t the message from Mr Allen then be that life’s not a bed of roses in the United Kingdom, think very carefully before you go there rather than they are European citizens like everyone else, there is no reason for Bulgarians to worry if you want to come to Britain. It doesn’t sound like a discouragement.

WH: Well he is saying they are not going to be discriminated against as Bulgarians and they’re not, we can’t possibly operate on that basis. In the European Union, as I say, one and a half million British people take advantage of being able to travel and work in other countries of the European Union so that right does extend at the end of this year to Bulgarians but don’t worry, we’re also very clear, the Ambassador is very clear and the Bulgarian media have reported heavily the comments and speeches of the Prime Minister on this subject, that we’re not going to be a soft touch, we are reforming our welfare system and we are not going to be the haven for benefit tourism that we might have been seen as in the past.

DM: Foreign Secretary, thank you very much indeed. The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, there.