ii) the Parties reach an understanding on the interpretation of
Article 4 outside the context of the formal meeting.
4. But Taiwanese action in elevating the issue through a public
statement at Copenhagen, effectively put an end for the forseeable future to attempts to persuade all Parties, including the Chinese, to agree to applying the Protocol to Taiwan in a way
that would ensure Taiwanese compliance and allow trading
restrictions to be lifted. In the absence of consensus it would
in theory be possible to push this through by a two-third
majority vote but we think it unlikely that others would wish to
take on the Chinese in this way and risk their withdrawal from
the Protocol.
5.
We have therefore reached the view that the only way of
protecting our interests in maintaining Hong Kong/Taiwan trade in CFCS (and protecting the UK owned production facilities in
Taiwan) would be to continue to maintain that Article 4 of the
Protocol does noř apply to Taiwan. This does of course have the
environmental downside of reducing leverage over the Taiwanese to
comply: we could tell them that acceptance of this
interpretation was conditional on their good behaviour, but could
not make such a condition public and would find it difficult to
enforce.
6. So we need to persuade the Commission and Community partners
that our literal interpretation of Article 4 is the correct one.
I understand that the the Commission are currently drafting a new
Regulation to implement the controls on halons and methyl
bromide. We could encourage them to use the Protocol wording
"any State not party" rather than the wording of Regulation
594/91 "non-parties". We suspect that they might be amenable to
this. You might point cut that the French texts of the Protocol
and Regulation do not have a difference in wording. It would be
particularly useful if the Commission could be persuaded to include in the regulation a definition of the term "non-parties", where used in the previous regulation, as meaning "any State not party". It would be useful if the Commission could propose this