TNAG-2731-FCO40-3937-Future-of-Hong-Kong-constitutional-development-1993 — Page 160

(b)

(c)

Only certain persons associated with the

organisations or corporate bodies in a sector (for example, the head of each organisation or corporate body) would vote for members returned by that sector.

Persons associated with an organisation or corporate body of a sector would vote for a college of electors; the college of electors would then vote for the members of the Election Committee returned by that sector.

(In this category, the direct elections by the persons associated with the organisations or corporate bodies could either be officially supervised by the Hong Kong Government or there could be unsupervised, informal voting within each organisation or corporate body. The latter might well lead to vote rigging, but, on the other hand, it would avoid the efforts and expenses involved in supervising the elections.). Voting by the college of electors ought not be complicated to organise since there should be relatively few electors making up the college.

The Chinese might prefer (b); HMG and the Hong Kong Government would presumably prefer (a); (c) would be a compromise.

6.

A separate set of elections for the Election Committee members is, of course, unwieldy but the Election Committee does have a quite separate purpose from returning members to Legco, namely to elect the Chief Executive. With that in mind and the fact that the Basic Law, Annex II provisions on the Election Committee for the second term clearly envisage the return of members in a way quite different from that with those returned by functional constituencies or geographical constituencies, a separate set of elections may be a necessary evil.

7. My proposal has certain resemblances to Option D but it is based on organisations and corporate bodies, not occupational groups. It would not overlap with the functional constituencies for the reason that it is based on organisations and corporate bodies within a sector. By way of illustration, the industrial functional constituency involves two divisions, whereas, in my proposal, there would merely be one sector, the industrial sector, with voting for the Election Committee in that sector based on organisations and corporate bodies in it.

8.

Similar principles could be adopted for the commercial, financial and professional sectors and indeed also for the labour and the social services sectors. In the case of the religious sector, voting could be organised on the basis of religious organisations and the various different religious groups within Hong Kong; I believe that most of the difficulties identified in the Exco paper, paragraph 8, with a religious sector could be overcome. Voting for members of the

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/Election