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I believe that these views are shared by this Council and by the entire community. Certainly, I can speak for the civil service in declaring that we regard the rule of law as the bedrock of our Hong Kong way of life.
How have we implemented this policy in practice? Let me start with this Council. In September this year, Hong Kong will have its first, fully-elected legislature. We can take considerable satisfaction in how far we have come since the 1991 elections in safeguarding the rule of law through ensuring a legislature which can command the respect of our community and the confidence of the outside world. Members need no reminder that this constitutional milestone has been reached only after major efforts both on the part of this Council and of the Administration.
Thanks to the Council's co-operation last year, we have completed a heavy legislative programme to replace the Appointed and Official Members and to establish a broader and more transparent system of elections.
Thanks to our voter registration campaigns, we now have two-and-a-half million registered voters. In the functional constituencies, the number of voters has increased fifteen times compared with 1991.
After putting in place the constitutional building blocks, the Administration has returned to this Council with an ambitious legislative programme to protect individuals against unfair treatment. Altogether some forty items of legislation have been introduced during the last three sessions, whose purpose is to enhance the protection of individual rights. For example, with this Council's co-operation,
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we are working together to outlaw discrimination on grounds of sex or disability,
we are providing additional resources to make justice more accessible to the community at large, both through increasing the scope of legal aid and through reducing waiting times for the law courts, and
we are working together to safeguard the individual's right to privacy of personal data.
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we have brought forward proposals to remove legal restrictions on press freedom, and
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