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What is our aim in these talks? It is very simply this: electoral arrangements that are open, fair and acceptable to the people of Hong Kong. We want elections that offer people a genuine choice, not elections vulnerable to manipulation and corruption.
Why does this matter? It matters for this reason: if there is no level playing field for the elections to LegCo, what hope is there of preserving a level playing field elsewhere - in the Courts, in the business world, for the individual citizen? If you compromise the elections to the legislature whose job it is to make laws, then you erode the foundations of the rule of law in Hong Kong. That is surely not what the British and Chinese Governments had in mind when they agreed in the Joint Declaration that the SAR LegCo should "be constituted by elections".
We are approaching these negotiations in good faith. As I told this Council in October of this year, we have offered major moves to try to meet Chinese concerns, conditional on our reaching an acceptable overall agreement, and without compromising on our principles.
But we have made clear from the outset that the talks cannot go on indefinitely. One of our responsibilities under the Joint Declaration is to ensure that the arrangements for the elections are put in place on time.
Because the negotiations started later than we would have liked, and are taking as long as they are, the pressures of the legislative timetable now bear down upon us. That is why we have concentrated in recent rounds on exploring fully the prospects for an interim agreement. We had hoped it would be possible to deal with the less contentious issues that way.
Despite our best efforts, that has not proved possible. The three straightforward and largely uncontentious issues on which we wanted early agreement were the voting age for District Boards, Municipal Councils and LegCo elections, the voting method for