IT is a rare honour for one of these effusions to provoke a reply from the Director of Administration of the Government Secretariat, so I am afraid we will have to re-visit that much-ploughed battlefield, the Court of Final Appeal.
R. Hoare accuses me (Letters, December 19) of 'unquestioning acceptance of the myth . . . that the composition of the court set out in the Bill contravenes the Joint Declaration (JD) and the Basic Law'.
Now I did not mention the Joint Declaration, actually. Contraventions of the JD have become so commonplace that the possible arrival of another one is of no interest. The Basic Law, however, has so far passed among us as a law like any other - to be applied, after the relevant date, to government and subjects alike.
Faced with a question whether something contravenes the Basic Law one does not, at least where I come from, accept it unquestioningly as a myth or otherwise. One reads the Basic Law. I quoted the relevant passages, which are quite short.
Having performed this simple manoeuvre one is likely to form an opinion about whether the proposed Bill conflicts with the Basic Law or not, and my opinion is that it does. I am not a lawyer. But this is a view, shared, apparently, by almost every lawyer in Hong Kong in 1991.
Since then, says Mr Hoare, the British Government has consulted further lawyers and issued an 'authoritative statement which sets out clearly why the 1991 agreement is consistent with the JD'.
Just a minute, though. We weren't talking about the JD. We were talking about the Basic Law. This is not a British law and it was not drafted by British lawyers. In fact British lawyers are no more entitled than the rest of us to issue 'authoritative statements' about it.