such a court will not take many years.
At the General Assembly, we supported the Commission's request to be granted a mandate to draft a statute of an international criminal court. We now await that draft and will give it very careful
consideration.
The fundamental problem is, and has always been, to secure the presence before the court of the accused. This cannot be done without the active cooperation of the States where they live. For this reason many states will be opposed to becoming parties to any convention establishing an international criminal court which has the power to demand the surrender of the accused. In that respect, Nuremberg is of
course not a precedent for today's circumstances.
You also asked about the democratisation proposals due to be
submitted to the LEGCO in Hong Kong next week. The Governor's proposals for the 1995 elections were raised at the twenty-fifth meeting of the Sino-British Joint Liaison Group which met in Hong Kong from 8 to 10 December 1992. The Chinese position in essence was that there could be no discussions of the 1995 elections unless the
Governor withdrew his proposals. We made it clear that we did not accept that either side has the right to insist on preconditions for talks. We did not insist that Mr Patten's proposals should form the
sole basis for such talks. We were prepared to discuss any aspects of the subject that the Chinese wished, as well as any ideas they wished to put forward or areas in which they felt Mr Patten 's proposals might be contrary to the Basic Law.