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is complete, we will be able to press a button and obtain instant Parliamentary approval. I note that there is no reference in the ExCo paper to the UK legislative requirement. As a precaution, I will therefore write to Government House to remind them of the difficulty of getting any Bill into the programme without ample notice, and the particular difficulty if the Hong Kong legislation has a controversial passage there which could spill over into Westminster.
5.
You also asked to know where things stood on our earlier discussions with the Lord Chancellor's Department about the possible recruitment of British judges to serve on the Hong Kong Court of Appeal. Again, the attached Hong Kong telegram gives the present position. In short, our discussions with the LCD last year reached the point of identifying two candidates. At that stage, Hong Kong's Chief Justice asked that the exercise be put on hold because he thought at that time that he could find a number of local barristers to join the Hong Kong Bench. This judgement (with which the Governor was never very comfortable) has now been shown to be unsound. Hong Kong now estimate that they will be short of about nine judges from now until 1997 and that there will not be enough local candidates to make up this shortfall. That will be one of the issues to be addressed by the Working Group referred to in para 5(a) of Hong Kong's telegram. My guess is that Hong Kong will ask us in due course to reactivate our discussions with the LCD.
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PF Ricketts
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