CONFIDENTI AL
2.
bett position to judge than the Secretary of State would be, was first enunciated by the Colonial Secretary, Mr Arthur Creech-Jones, in a parliamentary reply on 11 August 1947 (Hansard, Col 233: Annex A). Under this policy there have been numerous instances where the capital sentence has been commuted without any prompting from the Secretary of State and some instances where commutation has been affected locally in the light of consultations between the Governor and the Secretary of State. Only in one instance during many years has the Secretary of State advised the Crown to override the Governor's decision not to commute namely in the Tsoi case in Hong Kong in 1973, when HMG' » decision was based on considerations of UK policy quite
unrelated to Hong Kong.
2. The years in which executions were last carried out in the present dependent territories and in those countries in which The Queen is Head of State,are shown at Annex B.
The Need for Change
3.
Since 1970 feeling in Parliament against capital punishment has intensified. A move to reintroduce the death penalty for terrorist offences was defeated. There would be considerable support in Parliament for the abolition of capital punishment for those few offences (treason and piracy) for which it is still retained. Although the executions in Belize in 1974 and the British Virgin Islan da in 1972 did not provoke controversy, this was largely because they received little or no publicity outside the territories in which they were carried out. The Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary's assessment is that, if an execution were now carried out in a dependent territory, there would be strong adverse reactions in Westminster and outside.
4. In Hong Kong, as a result of pressure from Her Majesty's Government prompted by the Tsoi case and of the Governor's success in persuading his Executive Council not to oppose commutation, every death sentence passed since 1966 has been commuted regardless of the merits of each case.
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