TNAG-0189-FCO40-225-Chinese-marriages-in-Hong-Kong-1969 — Page 33

with respect to the publicity campaign, but also in the provision of additional registration facilities, and for the extension of legal aid services in matrimonial causes. The extent of such expenditure will of course depend on the nature of the legislation adopted, but it cannot be avoided and the Sub-Committee feels that these needs. must be fully appreciated by the Government before it embarks on legislation which might do more harm than good if it was not fully effective.

13. The Sub-Committee also recommends that regard should be had to the experience of the Government of Singapore in this connection.

14. A further point of great importance to which the Sub-Committee would like to draw attention is the desirability, apparently unnoticed by the authors of the Report, of avoiding the creation, in a modern community, of several categories of marriage, particularly where these are likely to assume a class character. The Sub-Committee feels strongly that when once the principle of registration is adopted as the sole legal basis of marriage in the Chinese as well as the non-Chinese community, then all marriages in Hong Kong should be based on a single form of registration, so that there would only be one category of marriage in the Colony. As will become clear below, the Sub-Committee feels that it would be quite feasible to produce that result in the proposed legislation. Similar considerations should govern the proposals for dissolution of marriages, and the subject is explored in more detail below under that head. At this point, the discussion will be confined to the major considerations of policy which affect this issue.

15. The Sub-Committee noted with approval that the Report recommends, under New Recommendation No. 9, that the Chinese Marriage Preservation Ordinance be repealed as "a piece of legislation which has become anachronistic and which gives the appearance of being discriminatory." However, the desirable principle of removing anachronistic and discriminatory barriers was not pressed as far as it might properly have been taken in the rest of the proposals made in the Report, for the whole proposal to create by legislation a special category of Chinese marriages is

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