4.25.
This formulation is neutral as to whether "accountability" is an obligation to report or an obligation to obey. Part V, however, provides: -
"The systems by which taxation and public expenditure must be
approved by the legislature, and by which there is accountability to the legislature for all public
expenditure, and the system for auditing public accounts shall be maintained."
This formulation, clearly, is an obligation on the executive to obey the legislature. It would seem to follow, therefore, that if PRC personnel seek to argue that their understanding of accountability at the time of the negotiations is what governs their formulation of article 64 of the Basic Law, something may have gone very wrong indeed, for no obligation to obey the legislature exists in the Basic Law save as in respect to taxation and public expenditure. In other words, if they understood "accountability" to mean an obligation to obey, why is article 64 so restrictive? I should like to raise this issue in Beijing.
Based on this difference, the following has been suggested to me:-
(1) "Bearing in mind that the Chinese term is the same in both
articles it could be argued that the specific meaning of "accountability" used in Part V should be used to construe the same term in Part I. By this reasoning Article 64 would be demonstrably in conflict with the Joint Declaration in both word and spirit. The inconsistency of spirit being, of course, that Article 64 representing as it does a curtailment of the present legislature's power to monitor the executive contradicts the clear intention of the Joint Declaration to give Hong Kong people more rather than less say in the management of the HKSAR than they have in the management of the Crown Colony."
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But is it a curtailment? I would like to discuss this with senior Legco Members.
(2) "By implication from the meaning of "accountability" in
Part V the legislature of the HKSAR should be vested with power to preview all policies devised by the executive authorities of the HKSAR and disallow them as they may do expenditure and legislation if they do not accept that they are in the public interest.
Are such arguments tenable? To whom could they be addressed? Most importantly, I do not think the points made in paragraph 4.24 should get lost. To summarise:-