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Foreign and Commonwealth Office London S.W.1
UNCLASSIFIED
SAVING DESPATCH
HKK 18/11
From the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth
To the Governor, HONG KONG
8 October, 1969
No. 465
Hong Kong (Non-Domiciled) Divorce Rules
Affairs
The draft statutory instrument enclosed with my despatch No. 458 of 3 October, 1969 was also referred to the Lord Chancellor's Office for their views. They have now raised some important general points, as below:-
"Apart from the actual draft, there are more general points which may cause difficulty and which you may care to put to the Hong Kong authorities:
(a) As from 1st January 1971 England is going to have a
completely different divorce law. Not only will the Divorce Reform Bill do away with all the old "matri- monial offence" doctrine, but the discretionary bars will have gone as well. In addition, we expect to have re-written completely the law on maintenance and custody, on the lines of the Law Commission's draft Bill annexed to their recent Report (Law Commission No. 25) and to have abolished the remedy of restitu- tion (Law Commission Paper No. 23).
(b) This will mean completely re-writing the Matrimonial
Causes Rules 1968 and they will not thereafter fit the substantive law as set out in the Matrimonial Causes Ordinance.
(c) As far as "non-domiciled" divorce is concerned, this
will presumably mean yet more amending Rules rule 7 will not be apt, for example, and rule 13 will no longer be workable, because the Ordinance will be largely inappropriate.
(a) As far as ordinary Hong Kong divorce is concerned,
section 10 of the Ordinance is going to be difficult to apply. It is already technically inapt because in England all divorce starts in the county courts, not the High Court. It will become more so when the
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/Matrimonial
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