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apparatus, together with a lack of any pressure from commercial law firms here for progress on such an agreement, has meant there has been no particular reason to relaunch this proposal. LCD and we now need to consider whether to resume work on this. There would probably be a long lead time involved in drawing up any draft agreement and then in negotiating an arrangement with the Chinese.
2.
It may
I should be grateful for your comments on this before we take matters any further with the Lord Chancellor's Department. It would be helpful if these could cover both the political/legal considerations and the extent to which you think such an agreement would be of real benefit to our commercial efforts in China. China has recently signed The Hague Convention on the service of documents abroad and apparently may be considering signing up to the Legislation Convention in due course. be better to encourage the Chinese to continue to accede to the relevant international conventions, rather than to press for bilateral relations. I do not see any need to consider a bilateral agreement for its symbolic political value which seems to have been part of the pre-1989 thinking. SI should also be grateful for any initial comments from Steven Bradley. The ' current agreements on the reciprocal recognition and enforcement of judgements between Hong Kong and the UK are continued to apply in Hong Kong after 1997. We will need to consider whether any bilateral UK/China agreement would need to take account of Hong Kong elements. Many of The Hague Convention have been extended
to Hong Kong by the UK.
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