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CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
Sir Jack Cater KBE
Chief Secretary
Government Secretariat HONG KONG
Telephone 01-
HKK 34011
RECEIVED IN REGISTRY KO. 51
12 JAN 1981
DESK OFFICER WEeference PA
No T12.1.
Te
Our reference UIKK 340/1/1 13/
Date 12 January 1981
Dear Jack,
NEW NATIONALITY LEGISLATION
1980
HKK 340/1
1.
I am sorry we have taken so long to reply to your letter of 20 October 1980 to Alan Donald but difficulties over the details of the Bill have only now been fully resolved. You will have received our Telegram No 20 of 9 January about arrangements for presentation to Parliament, which included a summary of the main points in this letter.
2.
We fully understand the atmosphere in which the White Paper was received in Hong Kong (your paragraph 2). We are very grateful for all the Governor, yourself and others have done to correct misconceptions about the purpose of the exercise. At this end Ministers have taken every opportunity to do the same.
It was,
of course, at our insistence that paragraph 16 was included in the White Paper.
Nomenclature (Your paragraph 4)
A
3.
As you know, this has all along proved a particularly difficult problem. Citizenship will be of the dependencies in general rather than of individual territories. For that reason your suggested alternative could give the wrong impression, though I agree it is shorter.
Hong Kong Passports and Titles for Immigration Papers, etc. Your Paragraph 5)
4.
These points fall outside the scope of the Nationality Bill itself and will need to be considered administratively. We hope it will be possible to meet your wishes in respect of passports, an essential feature of which will, where appropriate, be to identify the bearer with Hong Kong. But the expression 'British/Hong Kong' is some way from CBDT/Hong Kong and I do not think we can endorse it as either necessary or desirable for official purposes. This would not, of course, prevent people from so describing themselves to foreign immigration authorities but they could not claim official endorsement for it. We take the point about misunderstandings by junior officials but we would not expect the new arrangements to increase these significantly. Should a particular problem arise we would, of course, seek to redress it as quickly as possible.
CONFIDENTIAL
/Children