CONFIDENTIAL
7.
agree
A.R.
the new Chief Justice in the first instance. This is hardly a sort of subject for correspondence and I suggest that, if you agree, you might bring this up if you see Sir D. Trench before he returns to Hong Kong next week.
Kum hoff
(K.M. Wilford)
3 December, 1970
The reason is that I am sorry that this has been held up. when first submitted to me I thought that the arguments against mandatory minimum sentences in the draft would carry more weight with the Governor if we could tell him of the practical difficul- ties which had arisen in the administration of the law in
The arguments Northern Ireland in regard to such sentences. advanced by the Home Office struck me as likely to be dismissed by him as "looking at the solution through Western eyes "or" grounds of pure legal principle", to select two phrases from his letter. References to practical experience in the more "robust" conditions of Northern Ireland might carry more weight with him (I write as a half-Ulster man myself).
2.
However it will be seen from minutes at Flag J that the Home Office have not yet been able to get us detailed advice on this point from Belfast.
3. I should perhaps comment on the point in Mr. Wilford's minute of 3 December. When I was in Hong Kong in November,1969 the Acting Commissioner of Police told me that the Courts then were following a policy of not imposing sentences involving corporal punishment because it was felt that it was "inhumane" to hold a sentence of this nature in suspense over a convicted person who had a right of appeal which would inevitably involve some passage of time. I imagine that this policy which in one case seems to have been abandoned came from the then Chief
CONFIDENTIAL
/Justice