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Secondly, we do believe, as you know, that a provisional legislature before 1997, we think it would be bad at any time, we think that a provisional legislature set up before 1997, would be a questionable institution with questionable foundations doing questionable things and therefore it would be bound to, I suspect, to lead to questioning in the Courts in due course, but what we are intent on doing at the moment is trying to persuade Chinese officials not to do something which we think would be profoundly against Hong Kong's interest and I think that that makes much more sense than for me get involved in what some would regard as legal grandstanding. I do not wish the SAR Government to start off with people asking difficult legal questions about what it's doing and that's why I hope we can still persuade Chinese officials to behave sensibly.

Thirdly, you mentioned the human rights commission. I'd just say that there isn't an established, a regular practice in other open societies of establishing a human rights commission. Sometimes people follow the course that we followed, which is to introduce legislation like a Bill of Rights to guarantee peoples' civil liberties. In other cases people set up a human rights commission and try to do it institutionally. There's hardly any care, anywhere in the world of somebody doing both. I think there are perhaps a couple of countries where that happens. I think it made more sense for us to legislate on the issues like equal opportunities and discrimination against the disabled, to strengthen our legal aid departments, to work in other ways to bring our laws into line with the international covenants, rather than to set up an institution.

Presenter: Mr Chan, are you happy with the reply?

Question (in Chinese): On the first point I would like to have a supplementary question. Mr Governor, you stressed that to challenge this point legally might be rather complex. So does the Governor think that in fact the provisional legislature might not in fact be in breach of the BL and the JD? But whether it is legally unsound is actually something that is very obvious. But as Governor of Hong Kong, probably Mr Patten doesn't really want to take this issue to the court because that might destabilise Hong Kong and it might be detrimental to Sino-British relations. Could the Governor further elaborate?