TNAG-0232-FCO40-268-Legislation-relating-to-registration-of-trade-unions-in-Hong-1970 — Page 89

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Sir Alec Douglas-Home, P.C., M.P., Secretary of State for Foreign and

Commonwealth Affairs,

Foreign Office,

2.

Whitehall,

LONDON S.W.1.

Dear Secretary of State,

from:

NEIL KINNOCK, M.P.

24th October, 1970.

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Acknowledgement

Secrety

has not seen

ent for

Hong Kong the Rayle......

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(79)

Certain provisions of the Hong Kong Trade (Amendment) Bill have recently come to my notice.

In my opinion, these provisions, if enacted, would constitute a major threat to the infant Trade Union Movement in Hong Kong, the severity of the provisions would hazard the development of fruitful industrial relations and, most important, the provisions constitute a major threat to individual human rights in the Colony.

I would draw your attention to three clauses of the Bill

(i)

(ii)

Clauses 23 and 24 of the Bill which would tend to narrow the already limited right to picket established by the Hong Kong Trade Union Registration Ordinance to a prohibitive degree.

Clause 12 (c) of the Bill which would debar a person from holding Trade Union Office if he has been convicted within the preceding five years of "any offence involving violence or against public order" unless an exception is granted with the consent of the Governor in Council. This clause would, I feel, confer dangerous powers upon the Courts and the Governor to regulate Trade Unions in the Colony and to

seriously impair the emergence of an active Trade Union leadership.

Had some of the early British Trade Union leaders and, indeed, some of the most eminent Commonwealth leaders, been subject to such restrictions, I doubt whether our nation could have fashioned the democratic system which we currently enjoy.

The discretionary powers confered on the Governor by Clause 12 (c) are no guarantee that the rights of individuals will be preserved or that the growth of important social institutions shall be uninhibited. In any case, no community which has pretensions of democracy should make the development of Trade Unionism conditional upon the benevolence of a Governor-in-Council. One wonders too, whether a Governor who exercised his discretion liberally in the traditions of British Society, might not on some occasion be placed in an invidious position of fundamental disagreement with the Government of the Colony.

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