XN000022-1995-05-03 — Page 21

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Since receiving the draft Bill, the Chinese side have asked us a total of 28 questions, in 4 batches. We answered them all fully and promptly. The experts of the two sides met on 24 March this year and again on 27 and 28 April. At the latest round of expert talks we made progress. We gave the Chinese side further amendments to the draft Bill in response to suggestions and comments that they had made at the previous round of talks. The Chinese side at last produced a full and clear statement of their outstanding concerns, some of which we were able to deal with on the spot. Both sides welcomed the progress that had been made and agreed that the momentum achieved should be maintained. We proposed that a further expert meeting should take place as soon as possible, but the Chinese side were unable at that stage to agree to a specific date. We are now awaiting confirmation from them of when they will be ready for the next meeting.

Way forward

So that is where we are now. We are committed to introducing the CFA Bill into this Council, in order to implement the 1991 agreement and establish the CFA before 1997. We would like to have introduced the Bill in February, but we have deferred doing this, in order to give the Chinese side as much time as we reasonably can to study the Bill and confirm that they are content with it. They have had the Bill for almost a year now.

The time constraints facing us are very real. Because appeals to the Judicial Committee can take up to a year to be heard, it is important that the CFA should be operating by about July 1996. And the Judiciary will need at least a year after the Bill is enacted to put the practical arrangements in place and to have the CFA up and running. They will have to fit out the premises for the Court, select and appoint the judges - both in Hong Kong and from overseas, draw up detailed rules of procedure and enshrine them in subsidiary legislation. This all means that the CFA Bill must be enacted before the end of the current session. We recognise, of course, that Honourable Members will wish to have a reasonable amount of time to study this important Bill. So we must introduce the Bill into this Council as soon as we possibly

can.

This timetable is not one we have invented to put pressure on the Chinese side, or indeed on Members of this Council. It simply reflects what needs to be done if we are to meet our obligations under the 1991 agreement and establish the Court before 1997. If we fail to meet this timetable and the Bill is not enacted by the end of this session, it will need to be introduced into the new session of LegCo. But the new LegCo will not meet until October, and, as Members know, the first month or so of each session is devoted largely to the debate on the Governor's Policy Address. Even if we introduced the Bill at the first possible opportunity, it is not realistic to imagine that it would be enacted before the beginning of 1996, at the very earliest. This would mean a delay of at least 6-9 months. It would then be very difficult to set the CFA up before 1 July 1997.