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Question: You met with Foreign Office officials this afternoon; can you outline who you met, and possibly what you discussed?
Chris Patten: I met the Deputy Secretary responsible, Mr Burn. I met Graham Fry, and I met Sherard Cowper-Coles, the head of the Hong Kong department, plus some other officials, and we discussed broadly speaking the same sort of agenda that I discussed with the Prime Minister yesterday. We reviewed events since the Prime Minister's visit to Hong Kong. We looked in particular at the outcome of Mr Hanley's successful visit to Vietnam. We discussed some of the upcoming issues, for example on the human rights front, our future reporting to Geneva on the international covenants, and it was a useful meeting looking at the whole agenda - other matters too, but those are some of the main ones.
Question: On the UN issue, is that progressing at all, the reporting?
Chris Patten: I am thinking about our reporting, because we do not have any difficulty with reporting, and I hope that China will not have any difficulty reporting after 1997. Certainly the obligations on China to report are as clear as pikestaff.
Question: If I could come back to the human rights issue, perhaps with a more specific question than a general one, generally what might it be saying about long-term future of Britain as mother of the free if in 1998 Hong Kong ends up being somewhat less free and less democratic than Taiwan, and very specifically in that broad context and on the question of the human rights and the covenant, given that the newly-articulated - or fairly recently articulated - jurisprudential principles that human rights guarantees might require are permanent and involved with territory and not with sovereignty, will Britain join the 85 or so other signatories of the first optional protocol of the ICCPR so that individuals from Hong Kong if one accepts that jurisprudential principle - will be able to appeal directly to its human rights committee after 1997?
Chris Patten: On the first point it would be sad for Britain and even sadder for Hong Kong if after 1997 Hong Kong was less free and less democratic than it is promised it will be by China and Britain, but as well as being sad for Britain and sad for Hong Kong, it would be extremely bad for China's international reputation, because what China has signed up to in the Joint Declaration is absolutely plain.
Secondly. I very much hope that we will be able to persuade China that what among others the Chairman of the relevant committee said about jurisprudence, and I hope we will be able to persuade the Chinese that this underlines the case for them recognising their obligations and reporting to Geneva. If they decline to accept those obligations then we will have to consider the consequences, but I remain as reluctant this afternoon as I was this morning, yesterday afternoon, yesterday morning and previous weeks, months and years, to answer hypothetical questions about what we will do if China breaks its word.