Edited Transcript:

This morning we are going to focus on the war crimes being committed in Kosovo and our determination to bring those responsible to justice. The clearest evidence of the crimes being committed in Kosovo is provided by the tidal wave of refugees. Around 600,000 refugees have left Kosovo over the past month. NATO forces in the theatre have become a major humanitarian agency, supplying food to the refugees and building shelter and sanitation for them; they also manage an air-bridge of relief supplies to the neighbouring countries. Britain alone has flow in over 1300 tonnes of tents, blankets, food and medicine.

In Macedonia and Montenegro, almost all refugees now have some form of shelter, food and basic medical care. The logistics of getting the supplies to the refugees in northern Albania is still proving difficult. The UK's effort is mainly in Macedonia, where we are the lead nation in the NATO team. We do, though, have a convoy of trucks already operating in Albania and another available at short notice.

We are aware but we cannot at present confirm the reports of a further wave of refugees on the way to the borders of Kosovo; we are preparing contingency plans for a further exodus but no-one should underestimate the formidable problems of coping with the scale and the speed of the refugee crisis generated by the brutality of President Milosevic and his campaign of ethnic cleansing and those waves of refugees are generated by systematic and repeated crimes within Kosovo.

Today, I welcome Judge Louise Arbour, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. I have just held a meeting with her to discuss our plans for co-operation between the Tribunal and the United Kingdom. Later today, she will be meeting with Defence Secretary, George Robertson. I have assured her that the British Government will do all it can to ensure that those committing atrocities in Kosovo are brought to justice.

We have authorised the hand-over of British intelligence material to the War Crimes Tribunal. It is a rare step to release intelligence material, we have taken it because we are determined that those responsible for turning Kosovo into a slaughterhouse should be brought to justice. We have collated material on more than 50 separate incidents over the past month and we will pass it to Judge Arbour when we have built up a full picture of what happened, not just the gruesome details of the incidents themselves but the names of the units operating in the area at the time and the names of their commanders. We want to be sure that those brought to justice are not only the thugs who carried out the crimes but those who gave the orders. We will go on collating intelligence on further incidents as the horror unfolds and we will pass it to the Tribunal in what will be one of the largest releases of intelligence material ever authorised by a British Government.

The Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing did not begin four weeks ago, it has been going on for a long time. At our meeting this morning, I handed to Judge Arbour material gathered by our embassy in Belgrade in the months leading up to the present conflict; this material provides a running commentary on a sustained campaign of brutality going back over a year; it is an almost daily catalogue of murder.

In a space of one week selected at random - from 29 January to 5 February - it reports the discovery of the bodies of 24 Kosovar Albanians found in and around a minibus riddled with bullets; one Albanian killed by grenades thrown into a caf,; 3 dead Albanians found in a car in Tijana (phon) all with gunshot wounds; 3 Albanians killed by a grenade thrown into a shop.

That was the persistent pattern of terror which preceded the NATO campaign, the shelling of villages and the executions by Milosevic's paramilitary police were already happening even while we were exploring every avenue towards a negotiated settlement. The scale of inhumanity required to achieve President Milosevic's ambition numbs the imagination. Over a million men and women and children are on the move, fleeing from the death squads who burned, raped and shot their way through Kosovo. That is President Milosevic's final solution.

I cannot tell you which individuals will be brought to trial, that is for Judge Arbour's tribunal to decide on the basis of the evidence before it. It is an independent tribunal mandate by the United Nations but Britain will provide as much evidence as possible. I have appointed a senior official, David Gowan, to take charge of Britain's contribution to gathering and forwarding the evidence on which the war crimes trials can be based. His task will be to liaise with Judge Arbour and to comb through and analyse all the material that already exists in the Foreign Office and any new material coming in for evidence that may help the Tribunal.

The evidence is mounting with every day of the butchery from which hundreds of thousands are refugees. Each one of those refugees flooding out of Kosovo has been a potential witness to a war crime, each of them carries the evidence of their own eyes to acts of inhumanity against friends, family and neighbours.

What is happening in the killing fields of Kosovo is unforgivable. Our message to those responsible is that their crimes will not be forgiven nor will they be forgotten, there will be no hiding place for those responsible for mass murder, mass rape and mass graves.