Your Ref: IL/TRE/54/1
Our Ref:
Date:
23
June 1993
CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
23
37019
RECEIVEDE!
25 JUA 1993
REGISTRY
K OFFICER
PA Action Taken
London SW1A 2AH
STAY
Telephone: 071-
270-2647
BY FAX
D M Edwards Esq
Law Officer (International Law) Government Secretariat
HONG KONG
Dear David,
AGREEMENTS BETWEEN THE UK AND THE HKSAR
1.
11⁄2 Bentre 24/0
Baala pc
Zayl
Thank you for your letter of 24 May reporting a meeting you recently held in Hong Kong. The timetable you propose seems to us to be fine. We would propose to have talks on surrender of fugitive offenders, mutual legal assistance and reciprocal enforcement of judgements in the first week with the investment promotion and protection talks on the Monday of the second week, with air services and possibly visa abolition thereafter (but see the comments in paragraph 2 below). Obviously we will need to retain some flexibility over the dates until the arrangements for the JLGS in the rest of this year become clearer. It may prove necessary to hold a second round, but we would hope to be able to resolve any outstanding differences from the first round in correspondence.
2. Since we last spoke we have begun our trawl of other Government Departments here. We may have run into a problem over a Visa Abolition Agreement. One of the elements of the Maastricht treaty is to pass competence for the EC common visa list to the Community and it will be the Commission which will lead on which countries are added or deleted from the list. Until 1 January 1996 unanimous voting will be required to add any countries to the list but after then it will be done by qualified majority voting. We are examining what if anything the effect of this may be on Hong Kong but I thought I should alert you to the point now.
3.
We intend that our team will be lead by Shelagh Brooks as far as is possible. However initial indications from the Department of Transport suggest that they would prefer to
CONFIDENTIAL