CONFIDENTIAL
said was simply a description of a long-standing practice;
and, in strict law, no formal steps need be taken to alter.
the practice. Any Secretary of State is free, if he wishes,
to reconsider all aspects of a capital case and reach his ow
decision as to whether the Crown should be advised to
exercise the residual prerogative though it might be
unconstitutional for him to give a direction to Governors that
he wished them to refer all capital cases to him as a matter
of course for review here. It has been the practice,,whenever
the Crown has been petitioned for clemency/There was also
a period when all Hong Kong cases were considered in detail
in the F C O and commented on to the Governor before he
reached his decision and, as already mentioned in paragraph
8 above, when the Governor decided in the Tsoi case not to
commute, the Secretary of State advised the Crown to do so.
In general, however, the Secretary of State does not intervene
by reviewing cases and advising on the exercise of the
residual prerogative.
!
13. A departure from the practice described by Mr Oreech-Jones
would produce a two-tier system under which
any case in
which the Governor had decided to let the law take its
course would automatically be reviewed in the F C O. The
disadvantage of this solution is that it would tend to
undermine the Governor's position as the principal authority
concerned, and might lead to more petitions to the Crown and
other pressures on the Secretary of State than have hitherto
been experienced, as well as friction with the local/
14. There would moreover seem to be little object in
departing from the Creech-Jones practice unless as a result
the Secretary of State found himself free to commute the
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death sentence in every case
every case so as effectively to abolish
or suspend capital punishment in the DOTS concerned. But
No comments yet.
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