6•
7.
I therefore make the following specific recommendations:
(a) We should like your early general authority to
provide the Committee with regular and up-to-date information on any major changes during the year in any of our dependent territories, e.g. elections, referenda, new constitutions etc. If the Committee, or its sub-committees, ask us to provide information of any of our territories, for use in the Committee's debates, we should again like your early general authority to do so in writing; and we should let the Committee know that we are prepared to co-operate in this way. We should also in future write direct to the office holders of the Committee or to its Secretary, rather than, as at present, generally conducting our correspondence through the UN Secretariat. In other words, we should explicitly and publicly, recognise the Committee's role and ask to be associated with it.
(b) As a second step to be carried out after the Government's general review of our relations with the Committee, we should inform it of our willingness to come and take part in the debates (and those of its sub committees) on UK administered non-self governing territories. This would put us, I should add, on a par with current US practice.
In order to act on paragraph 6(b) above we would need to decide on our attitude towards visiting missions, territories which we do not recognise the Committee as competent to discuss and territories subject to sovereignty disputes. All these are matters which are bound to come up if we agree to take part in the Committee's debates. On these my recommendations are as follows:
(a) We should be forthcoming about visiting missions. There is no doubt, (and the 4 April debate amply proved it) that the Committee attaches tremendous importance to these. It is not a matter of free junkets, but of the Committee's whole raison d'etre. It feels keenly its lack of first- hand knowledge of our territories. It wishes to be involved more than on paper in the decolonization process. I do not think this is necessarily dangerous. With the exception of the Seychelles (where the position may conceivably get easier after the 25 April election) our smaller territories do not arouse violent political passions or prejudices at the UN. Indeed many members of the Committee recognise their special problems. Salim, himself showed he could be reasonable on his mission to Niue, to which he constantly harks back. I would also refer to the intervention by the Australian representative on the Committee in the 4 April debate. He said, in effect, that the Committee
should not be doctrinaire. If the administering power offered a mission somewhere the Committee should accept it, if, on the other hand, the administering power could not make an offer, e.g. because the local government did not want it, the
/Committen