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6. It is harder to demonstrate what practical benefits there are for Hong Kong if the Convention on Diplomatic Relations were to continue to apply after 1997. As you know there are many foreign consulates in Hong Kong but there are no diplomatic missions although diplomats may transit Hong Kong on the way to or from Peking. Nor does Hong Kong have any diplomats of its own. I would suggest inserting a similar sentence in the Benefits section of the paper dealing with the Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the Convention on Consular Relations to the one I have proposed for insertion in the paper on the Charter.
7. The paper on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties paragraph 17 makes no mention in its Benefits section of treaties to which the Hong Kong Government have entered into with other governments, such as investment, promotion and protection agreements and air services agreements. It may be appropriate to include a mention that the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties would apply also to these treaties, unless you consider there would be Chinese sensitivies about such a mention. I think it is also worth putting in the Benefits Section that unless the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties were applied to the Hong Kong SAR, the position in international law would be regulated by customary international law which is often less clear and certain than the provisions of the Convention.
8. It is proposed by Ms Foakes in her letter of 16 November to Mr Marshall that only PRC reservations should apply and not UK reservations or declarations to this category of political and diplomatic treaties. While I agree that there is particular sensitivity about the UK declaration accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ, I wonder whether this will be necessarily be the case with all of the other UK reservations and declarations to the treaties in this category. I have not however looked at them all. I think much depends on their particular content. It may be that none of them are suitable for continued application after 1997, but unless this is so, I question whether it is right to automatically rule out the continued application of UK reservations and declarations after 1997 other than those which are obviously inappropriate or politically sensitive for the Chinese. I see no real difficulty with the proposition that a particular reservation which is acceptable to the Chinese can be applied to the HKSAR but not to the PRC as a whole in the case of those treaties where the PRC is not a party but becomes a party in respect of the HKSAR only. I agree that there may be practical problems where the PRC is already a party and has made reservations applying to China and different and conflicting reservations apply at present to Hong Kong. But even in this case, reservations which are tailor-made, for example, to fit in with Hong Kong's social or legal framework, could continue to be applied since the Hong Kong SAR will have a different social and legal system from the rest of the PRC. Providing a
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