TNAG-2716-FCO40-3922-House-of-Commons-Select-Committee-on-Foreign-Affairs-enquiry-1993 — Page 162

Human Rights Committee, which is done on a periodic basis. A second

optional procedure which has not been applied to Hong Kong and therefore

cannot be explicitly envisaged, however desirable it would be, under Annex

I Article XIII, is the right of individuals to petition the Human Rights

Committee when they allege that their rights have been infringed.

However,

my view is that such a restrictive interpretation of Article XIII, final

sentence, does not give effect to what I would understand as being the

intention of that reference. The whole essence of International Covenants

in the human rights field is not just to spell out a list of rights that

are applied domestically; that is the function of domestic Bills of Rights,

domestic constitutions. The essence of them is the international procedure

and the international mechanism, so my interpretation of Article XIII and

I think it is a view that will be shared by other international lawyers

is that the reference to the provisions of the International Covenant

should be understood as covering the mechanism and that those mechanisms

that had been in force in relation to Hong Kong (that is to say the

reporting mechanism) should continue after 1997. Chairman, there is one

further element I would wish to add on this issue, which is that the Human

some lack

Rights Committee which deals with the International Covenant on Civil and

Political Rights had occasion recently to look at the question of

succession of one state or one territory in relation to an area where the

International Covenant had previously been applicable. It did so in

relation to the tragic situation in former Yugoslavia where plainly the

former ratifying state, Yugoslavia, had disappeared and there was

of clarity about what states had emerged and who was responsible for the

administration of the territory. The Human Rights Committee in looking at

this issue took the view explicitly that where one is talking about an

international human rights treaty the object of which is not simply

obligations between states but primarily to provide protection for

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