RESTRICTED
RECEIVED IN
REGISTRY No.31.
OCT 1973
INWARD SAVING TELEGRAM
SAVING TELEGRAM
BY BAG
2x1211
F
FROM UNITED KINGDOM MISSION TO THE UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK.
RESTRICTED
To Immediate FCO telno 99 Saving of 8 October, info Saving to Hong Kong and Peking.
YOUR TELEGRAM No.672 : HONG KONG AND THE UNITED NATIONS,
1.:
We discussed this informally with the Secretariat (Scott of the Legal Branch, responsible for the problem over the description of Hong Kong in the Narcotic Drug Documents) who thought that there would be no difficulty in principle to the use of the expression "country, territory or region" as proposed in your paragraph 3. But he pointed out that the idea that this formula could be adopted universally by the United Nations and all its agencies, however desirable, was unlikely to be attainable in practice since documents were issued by a number of autonomous or semi-autonomous agencies in a number of different places (he himself had not been consulted about the problem of the listing of Hong Kong in UNDP Documents).
2. In our view this is a valid point. We do not think it possible, to achieve uniformity in the description of Hong Kong in all United Nations Documents. Nor do we think it matters much even when, uniformity is not obtained. The context in which the list of Hong Kong occurs varies widely and whereas "country, territory or region" might be wide enough to be all-embracing it is by no means certain that it would be, nor that it would be always appropriate. (There might be cases where the word "region" was otherwise inapplicable).
3. We also discussed the question of the exchange of letters. we are not sure of what exactly you have in mind but it would appear from Hong Kong telegram 672 that this would be a public exchange. We think that this would be unwise since it would have the effect of making it appear that we were raising the status of Hong Kong. This would be bound to provoke a public Chinese reaction here and would also run counter to the informal understanding reached with them that we would not raise Hong Kong publicly if they did not do so (our telno 1545 of 1972). An exchange of correspondence with the Secretariat would not be open to the same objection but we wonder whether it is really necessary. Provided we are satisfied that in fact there is no question of altering the status of Hong Kong do we have to protect our position?
On the question of our freedom to include representatives from Hong Kong and other dependent territories in any United Kingdom Delegation Scott concurred with our own view that the manner of listing Hong Kong could not affect that freedom since the listing was a procedural question which could not affect the substance.
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/5. WE LEFT
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