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RF Hoare Esq
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Foreign and Commonwealth Office JAN 1985
LONDON SW1A 2AH
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Please reply to The Under Secretary of State
Your reference
Our reference
NTY/84 1337/0/9
Date
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4 January 1985
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040/8
HONG KONG LEGISLATION
(721)
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I am sorry I have not replied earlier to your letter of 12 December about Hong Kong's suggestion that the proposed provisions to guard against statelessness might extend to the children of non-British parents. I am taking the opportunity in this reply to raise two other points on which we should be grateful for your and Hong Kong's views.
It is not our intention that children of non-British parents should be able to benefit from the statelessness provisions. We take the view that it would not be appropriate to grant British nationality after June 1997 to the children of Hong Kongers who were not themselves British nationals. Once Hong Kong ceases to be a British Dependent Territory, British nationality cannot be acquired by a connection with Hong Kong. The proposed provisions are based on our obligation under the UN Convention on statelessness to facilitate the acquisition by stateless children of the nationality of their parents. Thus the provisions of Schedule 2 to the BNA 1981 which automatically confer British nationality on otherwise stateless children all require, amongst other things, that one of the parents is a British national at the time of the birth: so too do the provisions of paragraph 4 which give an entitlement to registration under certain circum- stances to stateless children born outside the UK or a dependent territory. We do not think it would be right to depart from this general principle in the case of Hong Kong, and it seems unlikely on the face of it that the Chinese would be happy for us to do so. Children born in Hong Kong after 30 June 1997 may apply for Chinese citizenship under the provisions of Chinese nationality law, and in our view this would be the appropriate step for them to take if they wished to acquire a nationality.
While on the subject of statelessness, we have not yet formally settled the form of nationality to be acquired by non-Chinese former BDTCs and their children who would otherwise be stateless on the loss of their British Dependent Territories citizenship. During the course of our various discussions last year both you and Hong Kong accepted that it would most likely be British Overseas citizenship. It cannot be the new nationality, since that must be acquired before July 1997, and it is not feasible to introduce yet another form of British nationality. We would be grateful for confirmation that British Overseas citizenship is acceptable to you and Hong Kong.
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