"The statement say.. "Thirdly, detainees have all. had a chance to app to an independent committee of review; Mr Grey h ad no chance to plead his case before any autho
Yet the Solicitor- General, Mr Sneath, in a tter to the Hongkong Bar Association (publish.... n the Association's Annual Report for 1967) hau this to say about the committee of eview: "I do not see this Committee as an appellate body standi over the Colonial Secretary, and exercising form of judicial function. On the contrary, consider that the functions of such a Committee are exclusively administrative and advisory, not supervisory". So much for any form of appeal.
4.
"Both your editorial and the Government statements fall into the trap of assuming the truth of facts which have not been established by any form of judicial procedure, and then arguing from that assumption that judicial safeguards and unnecessary. Does the Hongkong Government have so little faith in the Colony's Judiciary that it cannot leave it to the judges to establish the soundness, in fact and in law, of the case against the detainees, bearing in mind the Government's professed confidence in the strength of that case? It is surely not beyond the wit of the Legal Department to frame legislation that would cover the needs of the community for the detention of undesirables while allowing some form of judicial proceeding, in private if necessary, to determine the applicability of such legislation to particular cases.
"It casts no aspersion whatever on the police or other responsible authorities to press for judicial safe- guards in matters of this sort, Policemen are policemen, civil servants aze civil servants, and judges ane judges, and it may be assumed that they are all best left to do their own jobs. If legal standards are to be maintained here, then some form of judicial review, as a minimum, must be introduced into the present emergency legislation.
"Until some closer approach to the rule of law is made, the characterisation by the Government of its detainees can only appear highly subjective in the eyes of the world, for there is no independent and respected tribunal which can give us any assurance that some of the detainees are not as innocent as Mr Grey. Over-reactive comments from the GIS or from yourself scarcely correct this state of affairs. Meanwhile, to expect the Chinese to apply legal standards which we have long preached (indeed, the need for our kind of legality in this part of the world was one of our stated reasons for wanting Hongkong in the first place) while not really
practising themselves, if not hypocrisy, is something indistinguishable from it."
SOME COMMENTS FROM TA KUNG PAO, HONG KONG
"Did Cradock know?" 7 November, 1968
"As soon as he arrived in Hongkong from Peking on October 30, Percy Cradock, the Acting British Charge
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