CE's decision on LegCo electoral boundaries welcomed

The Electoral Affairs Commission welcomed the decision of the Chief Executive in Council to accept all of its recommendations for the delineation and naming of five geographical constituencies in respect of the Legislative Council election in September 2000.

The Commission made the recommendations following a one-month public consultation exercise in September and submitted a report to the Chief Executive on October 30. Six submissions were received and four people addressed the Commission at a public forum.

"We have carefully considered all the public representations and decided that there was no need to alter our provisional recommendations, which were adopted as our final recommendations," a spokesman for the Commission said.

"There was not a single representation requesting modification of the boundaries of our provisionally determined constituencies. It appeared that the community accepted our approach of keeping the boundaries of the existing five geographical constituencies intact," he said.

The spokesman pointed out that some of the representations had put forward suggestions that were beyond the Commission's ambit.

"In fact, the Commission was bound by a number of statutory criteria in drawing up the recommendations. For example, the law stipulates that Hong Kong must be divided into five geographical constituencies and each constituency is to return between four and six members," he explained.

"While the population of each constituency is a primary consideration, the law also requires that each constituency be formed by two or more contiguous whole District Council constituencies. Moreover, the Commission must have regard to factors such as the existing boundaries of Districts and the Municipal Council areas," he added.

The 24 Legislative Council seats are allocated to the five geographical constituencies as below: