Part II begins with the UK’s failure to secure a role for the Hong Kong judiciary in relation to the 1984 Joint Declaration. Part I had discussed the idea during the negotiations of subjecting amendments to the Basic Law to the judgment of an ‘international commission’, where Geoffrey Howe had considered it to be a non-starter. Instead, there was an attempt to have the Basic Law’s terms dictated in detail by the terms of the Joint Declaration resulting in a short statement of China’s ‘basic policies’ in paragraph 3 in the main body of the Joint Declaration, a more detailed ‘elaboration’ of these in Annex I and a clause in paragraph 3 (paragraph 3(12)) stating that both these basic policies and their elaboration will ‘be stipulated’ in ‘a Basic Law’ and will remain unchanged for fifty years.