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Ms E Wilmshurst
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
The Legal Secretariat to the Law Officers Attorney General's Chambers
9 Buckingham Gate
London SE1E 6JP
31 July 1990
RoR
HKD241
- 1 AUG 1990
-261
fu118.
Pantes.
fa
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Jear Elizabeth,
HONG KONG BILL OF RIGHTS
1. You sent me a copy of your letter of 25 July to Pamela Major on the Hong Kong Bill of Rights.
2. I am not going to defend the ExCo Memorandum; I spent a great deal of typescript in dissenting from various parts of it, but, on the other hand, I would not go along with the final sentence in your main paragraph.
3.
3.
Surely our position is as follows:-
(a) only States parties to the Covenant have
(international) obligations under the ICCPR;
(b)
(c)
those obligations extend to "respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognised in the present Covenant ... (Article 2.1), to taking "the necessary steps
to adopt such legislative or other measures as may be necessary to give effect to the rights recognised" in the Covenant (Article 2.2), and "to ensure that any person whose rights or freedoms
are violated shall have an effective remedy, nothwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity" (Article 2.3(a));
to the extent that rights recognised by the Covenant may be violated by private persons, a State's international obligations may include an obligation to make individuals answerable in domestic law for such violations.
Point (c) is exemplified by the case of X and Y v. The Netherlands (European Court of Human Rights, Judgment of 26 March 1985). Paragraph 23 reads as follows:-
3 PFAAV