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HONG KONG: ELECTION ARRANGEMENTS
-OKIGINAL MISSING
132
(original Removal)
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FROM: P F Ricketts
Hong Kong Department 21/12
DATE: 4 November 1992
cc: PS/PUS
Mr Davies, FED
1. Your minute of 26 October recorded that the Secretary of State had asked how the important point about the composition of the Election Committee discussed in Ministerial correspondence in 1990 came to be neglected in developing the Governor's proposals.
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2. I have as you suggested conducted a post-mortem with those concerned in Hong Kong and .Peking. - I attach the... replies from Sir R McLaren, Mr Galsworthy and Mr Ehrman to my request for comments.
3. The first point to make is that officials were at fault in not retrieving these Ministerial exchanges and bringing them to the attention of Ministers and the Governor over the summer. It may well be that the Governor would not have come to any different conclusions had he known about the existence of these exchanges. But they should have been properly considered. We would then at least have been better equipped to deal immediately with Chinese claims that we were breaching previous understandings.
4.
In the light of comments from posts and discussions here, I conclude that there were two main reasons for our collective failure to recall these exchanges.
5. First, bureaucratic shortcomings:
the Governor's proposals on the composition of the Election Committee were developed in Hong Kong over the summer, mainly by the Secretary for Constitutional Affairs, Mr Sze, and his staff. Mr Sze was not in post at the time of the 1990 correspondence. Those papers were not in the files, but in a personal folder which was not drawn to his attention when he took up the job. Others in Hong Kong who were involved at the time of the 1990 exchanges failed to remember them;
ct.arrang.GEN.bern
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