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Governor's question-and-answer session
Following is the transcript of the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's question-and-answer session at the International Federation of Journalists Asia Regional Conference today (Monday):
Question (Jonathan Mersky, Times): You quoted President Havel. Journalists are also writers. According, as you know, to President Havel, there is at least one well known Vietnamese writer in a Hong Kong detention centre. This is a woman who has been sentenced in absentia by her Government, I understand. Is the Hong Kong Government going to be very careful that amongst those being sent back to Vietnam, that there are not potential political prisoners who are writers?
Governor: The Hong Kong Government is going to be very sensitive on that issue, as I shall be explaining in very precise and detailed terms in a response to the letter which President Havel wrote to me.
Question (Aidan White, Secretary General, International Federation of Journalists): I was very glad to hear you speak, Mr Governor, and I must say agreed with almost everything you said. But I want to put a question regarding the future in Hong Kong and the conditions within which journalists and media will have to operate. To what extent can we rely upon the economic liberalism that you talked about, which has been so significant in other parts of the region, when unfortunately very, very serious signals of a different approach are sent to the incoming administration in China when a major multi-national company decides to censor the news and information it's going to put into China through its satellite broadcasts in order to meet what are the political objections which exist in China to free information? Can really the free market protect in Hong Kong, freedom of expression and the freedom of the press in the way that you have described it?
Governor: I was very impressed a couple of years back when one of the world's biggest, maybe I should say greatest, media proprietors made a moving speech, I think in Australia, saying that satellite television, spreading information, taking information to everyone's hearth and home was one of the reasons why totalitarianism had had its day and that totalitarian governments could no longer survive and I thought that that was a very meaningful and I'm sure passionately felt speech. Whether it's had any managerial or commercial implications, it's not of course for me to say.