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Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London S.W.1
19 June 1975
From the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State
The Rt Hon The Lord Goronwy-Roberts
Ben,
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Mr. DidwiDoy,
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Hub 20%.
You wrote to Jim Callaghan on 11 June enclosing a letter you had received from Mr Y W Font of Duke Wellington House (9th Floor), no. 12-24 Wellington Street, Hong Kong about capital punishment in the Colony. As you may know, Mr Fong wrote to us direct on the same matter in June last year.
I had further discussions with the Governor on this question when he was in London in April. However, there is little I can add to what I told you in my letter of 26 July 1974. Both Jim and I are fully aware of the strength of feeling in Hong Kong but, equally, we still believe that, if he had to defend an execution in Hong Kong in the House on a free vote, he would not get a majority.
We must continue to hope that the people of Hong Kong may in due course come to accept, as other civilised countries have done, that the presence or absence of the death penalty, in practice, makes little difference to the No-one would deny that crime is a very serious problem in Hong Kong, as it is in many other densely populated parts of the world. But the increase in
2929 problem of serious crime.
Det to led lec
$20/6
Ben Ford Esq MP House of Commons
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