foregoing grounds two-stage marriages of the kind apparently intended by the authors of the Report were unacceptable, and they felt that it should be absolutely clear that registration alone should be legally conclusive as to the form of marriage. This would of course leave the parties absolutely free, as they now are with marriages registered in accordance with the Marriage Ordinance, to go through any traditional observances they may choose to adopt but these are without legal significance.
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35. De Basto and Dicks also considered, on the grounds mentioned above at paras. 14 to 17, that the Government should give serious thought to avoiding altogether the creation of this second category of registered marriage for Chinese persons alone a category which would quickly acquire the appearance of "second-class" marriage. They felt the creation of two categories of registered marriage to be particularly undesirable in view of the disturbing possibility, apparently accepted with equanimity by the authors of the Report, that choice of one of the two forms of registered marriage would also involve choice of the law governing the dissolution of the marriage: see the remarks below on New Recommendation No. 8. The remedy, in their view, would be a provision that after the Appointed Date, all marriages not celebrated in a place of worship licensed for the purpose must be registered according to a single procedure. They accepted that some modifications in the existing registration procedure might be necessary, and they realized that the additional facilities would be required on a slightly larger scale than would be necessitated by the sort of machinery apparently contemplated by the authors of the Report. However, they felt strongly that these disadvantages would be outweighed by the advantages of a single, unified procedure which would prevent abuses and misunderstandings, would be a legally elegant solution to the problem, and would be more readily comprehensible to the Chinese community as a whole by virtue of its very simplicity. The idea of registered marriage according to the existing pattern is already increasingly appreciated in Hong Kong, and indeed a marriage certificate is often a valued token of progressiveness and sophistication. It is the view of the majority of the Sub-Committee that if the step of imposing a requirement
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