TNAG-2112-FCO40-3011-International-Rights-and-Obligations-Sub-Group-of-the-Sino-B-1990 — Page 51

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

London SW1A 2AH

о

Telephone 01-

расс

Your reference

B J Ireland Esq

Constitutional Affairs Branch

Government Secretariat

Hong Kong

Our reference

SAIAGB/RW

60

14 November 1990

Date

HKC031/12

RECEIV

2 7 NOV 1990

Dear Bart

IRO SUB-GROUP: MULTILATERAL TREATIES

INC

1. Now that we have moved on from multilateral organisations to multilateral treaties I should like to feed in a suggestion about the way we tackle the preparatory work that needs to be done before we approach the Chinese.

2.

Given the large number of treaties to be considered it seems entirely right that you should take them in manageable batches. However it seems likely that you will often require some supporting documentation, such as copies of the UK's Declaration extending the various agreements to Hong Kong. The two recent batches of customs treaties are an example.

3. In practice this involves quite a lot of work. On each occasion our post (UKMis New York in the case of UN Agreements) has to make a separate request to the Depositary of the relevant treaties.

4. In order to avoid a lot of this to-ing and fro-ing I wonder if it might be possible for you to put together a comprehensive list of documents of this sort that you will require. We could then request the whole lot in one go. Even if it were not possible to deal with all the treaties in this way we could at least aim to reduce the amount of telegraphing this exercise requires. This would not, of course, alter your plans for when you put different batches to the Chinese: it would be entirely for internal convenience.

I should be grateful for your views.

Yours ever Chris

CJ Sainty

Hong Kong Department

CC:

A I Aust Esq, UKMis New York