CR/EIC.213/5/11
II
COPY
火
11/27
21 July, 1969
Dear Mr. Jerving,
It was a great pleasure to make your acquaintance on my recent visit to Oslo. I am most grateful for the very friendly reception you accorded Mr. Yeung and me and for your hospitality. Indeed I enjoyed my visit to Oslo so much that my only regret is that it was so short.
I would have written before this to express my thanks to you and your colleagues, but I did not get back to Hong Kong until well into July. It is of course always a pleasure to meet our Norwegian colleagues and personally I look forward to our meeting to consider the future of our existing arrangements for non-cotton garments, though officially I suppose I should express the gravest reservations about any proposal to extend these purely temporary arrangements, which will have no doubt served their purpose when they expire on 30 September!
In order to avoid uncertainty and disruption in the trade, we like to know well in advance what the arrangements for the coming year are going to be so that we can make some announcement and people in the trade (at both ends) can plan ahead. If we were to meet in the second half of September we should be unable to do this before the present arrangements expire. Unfortunately we still do not have a firm date for the Cotton Textiles Committee meeting in Geneva, though we know it will be in September. I should therefore like to suggest that, if the Norwegian Government makes a formal request for consultations, a Hong Kong delegation should come to Oslo in the fortnight before the C.T.C. meets, that is to say that if the C.T.C. meets in the second half of September, we would meet in Oslo in the first half of the month, but that if the C.T.C. meeting were to be in early September, we should come to Oslo in the second half of August. I should also be grateful if, if you do wish to propose consultations, you could let us have your formal request fairly soon, X with an indication of the range of items you would wish to discuss,
so that we can set in hand our preparations for the consultations. This could obviate the necessity for the actual consultations to be prolonged by an adjournment while the Hong Kong delegation refers back to Hong Kong.
Byråsjef R.I. Jerving,
Utenriks department,
7 Juni Plassen 1, Oslo, Norway.
Yours sincerely,
(sgd.)
D.H. Jordan