Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
10
Jean fol
HKC370/8
RECEN
27 FEB 1991
NEX
I
London SW1 2AH
From The Minister of State
24 January 1991
LEGISLATIVE PROGRAMME 1991/92: HONG KONG (APPEALS) BILL
Thank you for your letter of 18 January. Douglas Hurd is broadly content with the proposals. There is one element in them which, I have to say, will cause us serious difficulties: that the Hong Kong (Appeals) Bill should not be accommodated in the 1991/92 legislative programme.
In the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, the Chinese Government agree that power of final judgement in Hong Kong after 1997 should be vested in a local Court of Final Appeal. This provision is widely welcomed in Hong Kong as a guarantee of Hong Kong's judicial independence. We are well advanced in negotiations with the Chinese on the details and have persuaded them of the need to establish the Court at least four years before the transfer of sovereignty to allow it to gain working experience.
Before the Court of Final Appeal can come into operation, we must remove the right of final appeal of Hong Kong people to the Privy Council. This is the purpose of the Hong Kong
(Appeals) Bill. It will be a short bill (about 3 paragraphs). The legislation will not be controversial. It is essentially implementing a policy commitment already made in the Joint Declaration. It in no way compares in either scope or novelty to the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Bill which was passed in the last session. We would expect it to attract little debate.
The Governor of Hong Kong has asked us to do everything possible to secure space for this Bill in the 1991/92 legislative programme. Otherwise the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal is unlikely to be able to start its operations until well into 1993. The resulting delay would go down very badly in Hong Kong. Our Senior Representative on the Joint Liaison Group who has led the negotiations with the Chinese considers that the delay would be disastrous and do great damage to our credibility with the Chinese, for whose early agreement we have been pressing.
The Rt Hon John MacGregor OBE MP Lord President of the Council
Privy Council Office
LONDON SW1
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