The Government's Assurance
6. In his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on
24 May, the then Minister of State in the Home Office, Mr Timothy Renton, told the Committee that:
"if, against all expectation, any solely British
national with no claim on Chinese nationality come under
pressure to leave Hong Kong, we would
expect the
Government of the day to consider their case
sympathetically."
We cannot of course at this stage estimate the numbers that might be covered by this assurance. We would certainly expect members of the non-ethnic Chinese community in Hong
Kong to qualify for citizenship under the scheme provided
for by the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Bill, but cannot
anticipate the numbers involved.
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