The British government, in its latest six-monthly report on Hong Kong - covering the second half of last year - told Parliament that the 'one country, two systems' principle of the Joint Declaration has worked well and that the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Joint Declaration have been respected.
Because Hong Kong's handover was so controversial, the British government, to reassure the city and the world, said it would monitor the situation to see if Beijing was properly implementing the Sino-British Joint Declaration. The latest report is significant since it marks the end of the first quarter of Hong Kong's 50-year life as a special administrative region. Thankfully, so far, its rights and freedoms continue to be protected.
In this report, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said arrangements for 2017 and 2020 should 'meet accepted international standards of universal suffrage'.
It is good that Britain continues to report twice a year on Hong Kong, even though London tries hard not to provoke Beijing. As it happens, the Joint Declaration did not mention universal suffrage. It did include a vague provision that the legislature would be 'constituted by elections' and, where the chief executive was concerned, it allowed for the leader to be chosen not by election but 'through consultations held locally'.
It is the Basic Law, which is domestic Chinese legislation, that promises that universal suffrage elections will be held for both the chief executive and the entire legislature at some unspecified point in the future.
Since the reporting started 13 years ago, the standard conclusion has been that things were going well. There have been exceptions, such as in 2004 after Beijing reneged on promises that Hong Kong could on its own implement universal suffrage elections for the entire legislature.
At the time, Britain expressed concern and said Beijing's intervention 'seemed inconsistent with the high degree of autonomy guaranteed' to Hong Kong under the Joint Declaration. The British consul general at the time, Stephen Bradley, said the city was 'not very autonomous if you're told what you have to do and what you can't do'.