TNAG-2810-FCO40-4055-Future-of-Hong-Kong-International-Rights-and-Obligations-(IR-1993 — Page 112

ii) the Parties reach an understanding on the interpretation of

Article 4 outside the context of the formal meeting.

4. But Taiwanese action in elevating the issue through a public

statement at Copenhagen, effectively put an end for the forseeable future to attempts to persuade all Parties, including the Chinese, to agree to applying the Protocol to Taiwan in a way

that would ensure Taiwanese compliance and allow trading

restrictions to be lifted. In the absence of consensus it would

in theory be possible to push this through by a two-third

majority vote but we think it unlikely that others would wish to

take on the Chinese in this way and risk their withdrawal from

the Protocol.

5.

We have therefore reached the view that the only way of

protecting our interests in maintaining Hong Kong/Taiwan trade in CFCS (and protecting the UK owned production facilities in

Taiwan) would be to continue to maintain that Article 4 of the

Protocol does noř apply to Taiwan. This does of course have the

environmental downside of reducing leverage over the Taiwanese to

comply: we could tell them that acceptance of this

interpretation was conditional on their good behaviour, but could

not make such a condition public and would find it difficult to

enforce.

6. So we need to persuade the Commission and Community partners

that our literal interpretation of Article 4 is the correct one.

I understand that the the Commission are currently drafting a new

Regulation to implement the controls on halons and methyl

bromide. We could encourage them to use the Protocol wording

"any State not party" rather than the wording of Regulation

594/91 "non-parties". We suspect that they might be amenable to

this. You might point cut that the French texts of the Protocol

and Regulation do not have a difference in wording. It would be

particularly useful if the Commission could be persuaded to include in the regulation a definition of the term "non-parties", where used in the previous regulation, as meaning "any State not party". It would be useful if the Commission could propose this