Foreign and Commonwealth Office
King Charles Street
London S.W.1
HKK 14/19
My deur Bezgrɔ-Bek,
16 March, 1970
Application of retired district judge to be
admitted to practice in Hong Kong
Thank you for your letter of 11 March enclosing a copy of Jackson-Lipkin's
letter to you of 2 March.
As you will see from the enclosed letter to me of 2 March from Roberts (Attorney-General, Hong Kong) this application is unlikely to be pursued.
I shall no doubt be consulting you when Sir Ivo Rigby, the Chief Justice, writes to me on the general question of requiring undertakings from District Judges fifth paragraph of Roberts' letter.
If Jackson-Lipkin's letter needs a reply, I think you should reply to him and I am sure he would be gratified to hear from you directly rather than through this Office. Since, in passing on the information from the Lord Chancellor's Office we made it clear that the information was not confidential and could be used at Jackson-Lipkin's discretion, it would in any case have been perfectly reasonable
As it was to add a request that the source of the information should be protected. we were replying to a member of the Bar who had taken the rather odd course (or so it seems to me) of writing personally to the Lord Chancellor for information to use in contentious proceedings in which he was briefed; so our caveat was doubly justified, though one could hardly say so to Jackson-Lipkin. I think he must now be aware that his approach was, to say the least, unorthodox and if in writing to him 'you adverted to the fourth paragraph of his letter, a general word of reassurance would no doubt comfort him.
The 1963 Ruling to which Jackson-Lipkin refers in his fifth paragraph is no doubt the case of In re Courtenay Walton Reece, a copy of which I sent to you on 3 March. I do not recollect that the Lord Chancellor's Office gave any help to the Hong Kong Bar Association in connection with that case, though I myself may have discussed the matter with George Coldstream.
Yours Sincerely
JC Midie
LAST
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8
NE
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10
(J.C. McPetrie)
H. Boggis-Rolfe, Esq., C.B.E.