CODE 19-77
Mr T JD;
David HONG KONG & GENERAL DEPT
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43 Mr LN FERRY
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El Morphet, Eater pa
THE "CROWN COLONY OF" HONG KONG Reseach Ap
Chanery Peking Hong Kong.
T24/6.
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With reference to your minute of 22 June, you may be interested to read the following extract from Robert-Wray's Commonwealth and Colonial Law (1966) at pages 44 and 45:-
2.
"CROWN COLONY
This expression is sometimes freely used with a degree of confidence which is hardly justified, for it is difficult to say precisely what it means. The uninitiated might well think that it is mere tautology; that since all Colonies are dominions of the Crown, they must be Crown Colonies. But the inventors of obscure constitutional nomenclature were much more subtle than
that.
Martin Wight, in The Development of the Legislative Council, explains that, initially this term meant conquered Colonies 'in which the Crown ruled with unimpaired authority' but that they were soon augmented by new classes of Colónies: settled Colonies in which 'representative government! had not been attained, or was impossible; the West Indian Colonies which abandoned the old representative system; and the conquered tropical Colonies of the later nineteenth century.
*
This is very different from the questionable statement in Stroud's Judicial. Dictionary that the definition in? the Federal Council of Australasia Act, 1885, viz., 'any Colony in which the control of public officers is, retained by Her Majesty's Imperial Government', is probably of general acceptation.
་་༢་་
It may be worth reflecting that, in the days when the self-governing countries of the British Empire were
'Colonies', the expression was more understandable, as it was meant to connote Colonies which were not independent. Even then any distinction implicit in the word 'Crown' would be unsound; and it would be far from correct to say that a Colony is a Crown Colony merely because it has not become independent.
Let it suffice to say that the essence of a "Crown Colony" is that the authority of the Crown is unimpaired. While the Governor bears the primary responsibility, for
administration, close supervision and control are exercised by the Government (nearly always that of the United Kingdom) to whom the Governor is answerable in both the legislative and executive fields.
This is vague enough to demonstrate that the term is one which it is better to avoid."
I believe that Hong Kong used to be regarded as a Crown colony and that the name of the Corona Club derived from that fact.
to use the expression Crown colony nowadays, then it would I think apply to Hong Kong, which is a ceded
/colony