TNAG-2084-FCO40-2969-Death-penalty-in-Hong-Kong-1990 — Page 106

DRAFT MINUTE

FROM: SECRETARY OF STATE

TO:

HOME SECRETARY

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE BILL: THE DEPENDENT TERRITORIES

1.

Following the progess of the public debate on your White Paper proposing the improvement in so many ways of our criminal justice. arrangements, I have been wondering whether your bill does not present us with an unrepeatable opportunity to introduce a change,

namely the abolition of the death penalty for murder, in the Caribbean Dependent Territories and Bermuda.

2. It is clearly an anomaly that we have abolished the death

penalty in the UK but not in our Dependent Territories, or at any

rate, not all of them. There is no death penalty in the Falkland

Islands, Gibraltar and St Helena but it remains very much on the

Statute book in the Caribbean Dependent Territories and Bermuda and

in Hong Kong. The difference in arrangements for the UK and some of

our Dependent Territories on the one hand and the arrangements in

the Caribbean and Bermuda (and Hong Kong) on the other could be open

to criticism on racial grounds. Moreover, the appeals procedure is

narrow and the application of the so called Creech Jones doctrine

puts our Governors, whose position at the best of times is very much isolated, under tremendous pressures. In the Caribbean and Bermuda, the appeals are to the local Supreme Courts (and, in the event of a

point of law, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council) and, if that fails, to the Governor, advised by his Mercy Committee.

The Governor acts in loco majestatis so there can be no appeal to

the Queen advised by the Home Secretary and by the British press and

public opinion. In the Islands, public opinion is invariably

hostile to convicted murderers from elsewhere eg Jamaica, a fact