CONFIDENTIAL
Although the conferring of the power of judicial interpretation
on the courts of the SAR does not affect the power of
legislative interpretation of the Standing Committee under
Article 67 of the PRC Constitution [Ji Pengfei, ubi cit and Wu
Jianfan and Xiao Weijun to PF), circumstances in which the
Standing Committee might wish to exercise the power and the
practicalities of its exercise are another matter. The
Standing Committee is in no way a court of appeal from the
courts of the SAR [Shao Tianren to PF] and, as noted above, the
power is only exercisable in a way which will conform with the
Basic Law".
2. I would add that although the Standing Committee may not have a
practice of interfering in the operation of the PRC Constitution,
they have only interpreted it once and that not very clearly or
helpfully there could be influential Hong Kong lobby in favour of
a particular interpretation and, if it attracted a "one country"
strain of thought in the Standing Committee, there might well be a
disposition to interfere.
ель
P Fifoot
[ PS.
There is also the question of the highly misleading
positioning of the penultimate sentence of paragraph 3 of Article
157. It is fine so far as the limited scope of the earlier part of
that para is concerned, but it leaves outstanding the question of
the obligation of the courts to give effect to a legislative interpretation when that, in turn, involves the question of the
applicability of the Constitution of the PRC in, or to, the SAR].
CONFIDENTIAL