律政署
法律政策科
香港金鐘道66號
金鐘道政府合署高座4樓
專用電訊:81710 HKAGC HX 電訊傳真:852-8690720
• HKC241/5.
本署檔號 Our Ref.:
80 CAR 1901
來函檔號 Your Ref.:
電話號碼 Tel. No.:
867 2157
Foreign & Commonwealth Office,
London SW1A 2AH
Wit's Major ojR 9 p. BOR jpchen
ATTORNEY GENERAL'S CHAMBERS LEGAL POLICY DIVISION
4/F., HIGH BLOCK
QUEENSWAY GOVERNMENT OFFICES 66 QUEENSWAY, HONG KONG
Telex: 81710 HKAGC HX Fax: 852-869 0720
far.
(Attn.: Ms. P. A. Major
Hong Kong Department)
Дашевы
Den Pamele,
Bill of Rights: Chinese Version
See (7
11 March 1991
16
HKB301/1 @?
is
Paragraph 5 of Hong Kong telno 465 absolutely correct. There are two versions of the ICCPR in Chinese and we have been using the "wrong" one.
We discovered this fact only recently. Our legislative counsel responsible for preparing the Chinese version of the Bill of Rights was given a text of the ICCPR which Constitutional Affairs Branch had obtained from the UN Centre for Human Rights in 1988 or 1989. She was never entirely happy with this text because it contained, she said, a number of inaccuracies. Her misgivings were shared by the members of the OMELCO ad-hoc group who were given the task. of scrutinizing the Chinese text of the BOR. One of the legal advisers to this group compared the BOR Chinese text to a Chinese text of the ICCPR
ICCPR in another publication and saw that they were different. We were told this and we compared, for the first time, the official UN Treaty series text of the ICCPR with the one we had obtained from Geneva. They were different.
I wrote to E. Houshmand, Chief of the International Instruments Section at the Centre for Human Rights and asked him to explain why the Centre had produced a Chinese text of the ICCPR which was not the same as the UN Treaty series text. He said saying that he did not know why this had occured and that no one at the Centre could throw light on the matter. asked us for (and has now received) а textual comparison of the two texts.
He
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