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coming, namely St Helena and dependencies, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Pitcaim, Anguilla, and when the situation is clarified, those of the West Indies Associated States which will not be independent in the near future. (The procedure for getting the UN to face facts in the WIAS may differ, but in due course we will need to make provision on parallel lines for ending the present anomalous state of affairs).
6.
The Committee of 24, and through it, the General Assembly, judges whether or not a territory is non-self- governing and within the scope of Chapter 11 of the Charter by the criterion of achievement of a "full measure of self-government". It distrusts unilateral determinations by administering powers that such full measure has been attained, hence our difficulties over Brunei and the Associated States. What the Committee cares about is not simply the nature of the arrangements which have been reached, but that it should have the chance to verify at first hand that they accord with the wishes of the people. By judicious invitations to visiting missions in 1972 and 1974, New Zealand secured the deletion of Niue from the list of non-self-governing territories when the "solution" was in fact an Associated Statehood-type of constitution. The momentum of decolonisation at the UN and resolution 1514 both give prominence to independence. We have found from four years of visiting missions that the Committee will be realistic in cases where independence is not on. If handled right they will acknowledge that the wishes of the people are paramount. In Niue, and earlier in the Cook Islands, the missions verified the conduct and results of a referendum. Comparable observation of an act of self-determination in those of our territories which were not going to become independent could secure their exclusion from the Committee's list as well.
7. The trick has only been done recently on
territories with full internal self-government constitutions. The General Note on your tour of the Caribbean points clearly to a final status for territories not to be integrated with the UK short of this, in fact to a ministerial system in which internal security, the public service, and perhaps finance are reserved subjects. The question arises therefore as to whether a constitution which was sufficiently
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/watertight
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