TNAG-0436-FCO40-501-Relations-between-Hong-Kong-and-international-organisations-1973 — Page 87

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Committee should be understanding.

Not all the Committee

will of course, accept this. But my view is that once they, or some of them, have had first-hand exposure to some of our territories, they will be that much readier to understand the problems we have elsewhere. To put it another way, I think that the risk of accepting missions in general, but of having to stall on any particular one, is a lesser evil than that of having nothing to do with Missions at all. My specific recommendation would be that we should endorse the principle of visiting missions; that we should accept and promote a visiting mission in one or more of our dependent territories some time in 1975; and that we should inform the Committee of this before it closes its debates in August this year. would also put us in a stronger position for the Fourth Committee debates.

(b)

This

The Associated States and Brunei present particular problems. They call, in our judgement, for different treatment. As you know, the Committee claims that only it can say when a territory has ceased to be non self-governing. How we should react to this claim is something we should have to decide before joining in discussions on our dependent territories. (Independently of that we need to take a look at our attitude towards the Committees claims before this Autumn's Fourth Committee and General Assembly debates.) The Associated States used to be colonies. We also know (see Ken Jamieson's letter to Tom Keeble of 3 April) that Salim wants to remove them from the Committee's scope. I recommend that we should try to persuade Salim to hold only a brief debate, or none at all, on them; but that at the same time we would tell him we were willing to take part in the discussions. We would enter an explicit reserve, though in friendly terms, that we were only doing so in the interests of finding a mutually acceptable solution, and that the fact was that the Associated States had full internal self-government and were in free association with the UK. Nor would we volunteer missions, or if Salim proposed them (as he well may) give him any encouragement to think we or the States could agree unless we could thereby get rid of this problem for once and for all. Brunei is more difficult. It never was a colony. We never even had an obligation to transmit information under Article 73(e), and in retrospect it is perhaps a pity we ever started. If we were to participate in discussion we should inevitably be attacked over something which is not our responsibility. I recommend therefore that we should continue to insist that Brunei is not a territory which the Committee is competent to discuss and we should continue to absent ourselves from any debates. In practice, I don't think this will provoke too violent a reaction. The Malaysians are not on the Committee and they will save their big guns for the General Assembly.

Aspi

/(c)