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Reply:
I would assure this Council that the Government will follow the principle of openness and transparency in its dealings with the Preparatory Committee, and will account for its actions to this Council and the community. To this end, we will regularly brief this Council on how we are co-operating with the Preparatory Committee. We envisage that the Constitutional Affairs Panel will be the main forum for such briefings.
As to precisely what the briefings will cover, this question hinges largely on the details and forms of assistance which is to be provided by the Government to the Preparatory Committee. At their recent meeting in Peking, the British and the Chinese Foreign Ministers have agreed that the detailed arrangements for co-operation should be sorted out through the JLG channels. Once the modalities for co-operation with the Preparatory Committee have been finalised, and the appropriate arrangements for accounting to the public on our dealings with the Committee can then be determined, and in this connection we will certainly give very careful consideration to the views of this Council and the public.
For now, I would like to emphasise two points. First, our assistance to the Preparatory Committee will be within the three parameters stated by the Governor in last year's Policy Address, that is:
that it must be fully consistent with the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law, and be in Hong Kong's interests,
(a)
(b)
that the authority and credibility of the Hong Kong Government must not be undermined; and
(c)
that the morale and confidence of the civil service must not be affected; civil servants must not be subjected to conflicting loyalties.
The secondly point which I would like to make is that, whilst the Hong Kong Government will be fully accountable for its own actions, it cannot be held accountable for the Preparatory Committee's actions. We cannot speak on behalf of the Committee, or explain the Committee's decisions. These must be matters for the Preparatory Committee itself.
As regards the final part of Mr Ho's question, the role of the Joint Liaison Group is prescribed in Annex II to the Joint Declaration. It is a diplomatic body set up by the British and the Chinese governments to conduct consultations on the implementation of the Joint Declaration, to discuss matters relating to the smooth transfer of government in 1997, and to exchange information and conduct consultations on such subjects as may be agreed by two sides.