17 September 1992
BY FAX
....... kama -
Peter Ricketts Esq Hd/HKD
FCO
CONFIDENTIAL
British Embassy Paris
35 rue du Faubourg St Honorė
75383 Paris cedex 08
Telephone: (1) 42 66 91 42 Facsimile: (1) 42 66 95 90
Dew Peter
RAIS BIN SANIMAN
1. There is a further point which I did not include in our
This was a speculation I telno 813 of yesterday on Saniman. went into with Mme Masse-Dessen as to whether we might be able to spin-out the appeal process long enough to carry us beyond the next legislative elections (March 1993 at the latest) at which point there will almost certainly be a change of government. She thought that things could successfully be stretched out this far. She would not advise a delay in putting forward the first stage communication to seize the Conseil d'Etat (because this would constitute the unmistakeable signal that we were serious about going through with the appeal) but she thought that the detailed documentation could certainly be left until the back end of the next four months - if the Ministry of Justice had not given in in the meantime and that consideration of this weightly dossier by an individual member of the Conseil d'Etat who would be nominated to do the donkey-work, would certainly take long enough to carry us beyond March 1993.
2.
There are therefore two strings to our bow, and I am mildly more optimistic than I was that we may be able to make this exercise into more than a gallant but failed effort for the record. The first string is the possibility that we shall actually be able to lever a change of position out of the French under the present government; the second is to play for every delay we can in the hopes that a new government may positively wish to revise a few of the more dubious legal decisions of the previous one. The judiciary is one of the areas in which the Socialists are accused of manipulating the system.
However, all this hangs on some rather complicated arguments on points of law, and frankly I am not able to judge
3.
CONFIDENTIAL