{
HOME OFFICE
Lunar House, Wellesley Road, CROYDON CR9 23.
CWI/73 1230/302/3 GVM349/2
R M Sands Esq
Telephone: 01-686 0333, ext. 2507
Foreign and Commonwealth Office!
Migration and Visa Department
Clive House
2822+
GUM 349
མནསན་
2
€ FEB MOZ
Petty France London
(NIR)
i
5 February 1982
Seelly
2
[of the immigration
Rules]
Entitlement of certain Hong Kong CUKES to readmission to the UK
Thank you for your letter of 22 January. I am sorry not to have responded earlier. I am afraid that even this is really little more than an interim reply but I do not think that we are yet placed to give you much more.
On a purely technical point, we appreciate that we are not talking about a new entitlement. The force of "now" in the antepenultimate sentence of Clift's letter of 13 October was that of a continuing entitlement arising from their past status.
HKK 340/1 (411
1981
I think this points to the distinction we see between the two limbs of paragraph 5. As I understand it, the Hong Kong Government are concerned about the position of those who were once exempt from our immigration control, that is to say those who had a passport issued in the United Kingdom without endorsement. There is a question of principle whether the "entitled to readmission" endorsement should be applied to any British Dependant Territory passport, but our more serious worry in some ways is the possibility that people might qualify even more anomalously for readmission under the second limb, by virtue of having been admitted free of conditions (as students or visitors), between 1962 and 1965 when travelling on Colonial passports, they were subject to control under the 1962 Act, who could therefore say that they had been "admitted for settlement, who subsequently obtain a United Kingdom passport and are then within the scope of the second part of paragraph 5. A person who had throughout held a United Kingdom passport could not claim to have been admitted for settlemen until after the coming into force of the 1968 Act, and it is clear that Colonial CUKCs who were admitted free of conditions in conformity to the normal practice in the early 1960s were not in a proper sense "admitted for settlement". There might be some difficulty about treating differently claims to readmissibility under the two parts of paragraph 5, enabling one to be carried forward indefinitely but the other not. We must not therefore be too complacent, and it would probably be prudent not to give any encouragement to Hong Kong, but I am not sure that the issue between us will necessarily be very substantial.
I think there are two important points to make about the new definition of
"United Kingdom passport" in the British Nationality Act 1981. First, the definition in the 1981 Act serves a narrow purpose, arising from section 39 (3),