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Mr Paul, HKD
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CONFIDENTIAL
اکھیا
185
Miss Marsien
Mr Wood
Mr Forrman
Miss Elit
Mc Walker
FAC Enquiry into Hong Kong
You attended a meeting with the Secretary of State this morning to go over the material submitted with your minute of 14 March for the Secretary of State's formal evidence session with the FAC on 22 March. The following were the main operational points that arose.
The Secretary of State agreed that the session should not
be divided into public and closed evidence.
The Secretary of State agreed that you should indicate clearly to the FAC in advance the areas on which we cannot supply much detail.
The Secretary of State said that it was even more important than usual to discover as far as possible the questions that the FAC would ask.
The Secretary of State would like you to go through all the material you submitted and the "information pack" (which should be ready by 22 March) to identify material that can be handed over to the FAC. The aim should be to give them as much material as possible to impress on them the scale and the complexity of the subject they are studying.
We
The Secretary of State recognised that there were limits on what we could say on the Basic Law. We should however highlight the key improvements made in the second draft
(drawing on the BLCC's own published comparison document). should also find one or two illustrations of ideas which were developed from "a gleam in the eye" through to detailed text in the Basic Law. We should also identify a few important remaining areas of contention in Hong Kong. We should make the point that the key consideration was not what HMG or the FAC considered to be right for the Basic Law but whether the Hong Kong people themselves were content with it.
We should also spell out in detail the channels that we have used for discussion with the Chinese on the Basic Law including the legal experts channel.
The Secretary of State would like some good examples of negotiations outside the Basic Law context where we can say that we have stood up to Chinese resistance and brought them round. GATT, air services and civil service pensions were mentioned as possible examples.
/The
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