successor to shoulder obligations which were believed in 1954 and 1961 to be due to members of HMOCS.
12.
We have, in effect, already answered the substantive question, most recently in Lord Caithness' letter of 23rd March 1992 to Mr Cartland and by tabling our proposals for a scheme. The issue is not that the British Government intends to stand aside but of
aside but of its apparent reluctance to follow the conditions and principles previously laid down and the practice by which they were previously implemented. What are the stated grounds for not doing so?
13.
After much thought, the most we were able to come up with when the FCO/ODA team presented the
presented the current proposals in Hong Kong was that schemes were tailored to the circumstances of each territory and there were special circumstances relating to Hong Kong which justified a scheme which was different
different from previous ones.
These special circumstances were said to be:
(a) the Joint Declaration, and in turn the Basic Law, provided for
for continuity of employment in a territory in which the capitalist system and existing life-style would be unchanged for 50 years, and,
unlike other territories, there was no active policy of localisation;
(b) Hong Kong officers with ten years service can retire with a deferred pension; this was not the case in other territories;
(c) the scheme will be funded
funded by the the United Kingdom, not the local government, and the United Kingdom must have regard to contemporary employment conditions in the United Kingdom and the disparity between the salaries of Hong Kong civil servants and UK civil servants.
Do these reasons hold up?
14.
A very good case can be made that they do not and that,
whatever substance they may have, they do not provide cogent arguments for the kind of proposals presently put forward.
The existence of an undertaking for further employment, even though it may go further than the practical opportunities for further employment open to various categories of colonial civil servants and judges in other territories (who, if they continued to serve, enjoyed the benefit of Public
Public Officers' Agreements safeguarding their conditions of employment and pensions entitlements), does not provide a continuance of a career in the service of the Crown, or necessarily of the same kind, and under the same kind of conditions, as those which the officers presently enjoy. Even if one leaves aside the distrust which many of the officers have expressed of the offer of further employment in the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law (and it is hardly reasonable to expect the members of HMOCS to put their trust in Chinese intentions if the British Government are not willing to consult the Chinese authorities on these issues) and their apprehensions of discrimination by Chinese colleagues in the service of the what is on offer is employment by a Chinese government of a part, however special, of a country the sovereign
SAR,
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