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UNIVERSITY
格明 物德
OF HONG KONG
SAPIENTI
DEPARTMENT OF EXTRA-MURAL STUDIES
Mr. Anthorny koyle, M.P., House of Commons,
Westminster,
London.
27th November, 1968.
160%
Dear Mr. Royle,
A copy of The Times carrying your letter concerning Mr. Anthony Grey's detention has now reached Hong Kong and I hope you will bear with me if I write to you personally upon this matter.
I enclose a copy of a letter I have written to The Times in answer to Mr. Sedgwick. You may think on reading it that the Hong Kong Government's "demolition" of my letter is not so effective on further examination as it may at first sight have appeared.
I fully share your anxiety for Mr. Grey and nothing in my letter implied that I condoned his disgraceful treatment. My point was that so far as the fact of detention without trial is concerned (and that fact only) the actions of the Hong Kong Government, approved by the British Government, have put us in a morally insecure position from which to complain about it. It seems to me that this point is quite unaffected by the fact that the particular motivation for Grey's imprisonment was a direct retaliation to the imprisonment of the Hsinhua newsmen after a public trial.
I fully appreciate that there were differences in the detention of Grey and the detention of persons on suspicious of subversive activities during the emergency. But the Hong Kong Government was not forced to choose between two stark alternatives, to do nothing about subversive elements or to abandon the rule of law. Carefully framed legislation could have ac ieved both objectives. Instead we have the regulations a copy of which I enclose.
You may recall the speech of Herbert Morrison in the House ing! 1939 in discussing Regulation 1813: something to the effect that "I am not going to use the argument, usually put forward as a matter of
courtesy/....
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