MOR
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Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
Telephone 01-
Pa
Ethnic mesonates
عليكم
WA
па
Mr N Johnson
BOMBAY
HKD 340/2 Ако
RECEIVED IN REGISTRY
18 JUN 1990
DESK GEFICER. INDEX
REGISTRY
PA
Action Taken
Your reference
341/13
GVM 341/3
Our reference
Date
23 April 1990
Near Neville!
HONG KONG
1.
LONG-TERM PLANS FOR INDIAN COMMUNITY
In your letter of 7 March to James Smith-Laittan, who has now left the Department, you asked for information on the current policy proposals concerning the status of the Indian community in Hong Kong after 1997.
2.
The issue has been pushed hard by the Council of Hong Kong Indian Associations. Following the Secretary of State's announcement of the scheme to provide British passports to key people in Hong Kong to the House of Commons on 20 December, in which he declined to treat the ethnic minorities in Hong Kong as a special category and said that the passport scheme will be on merit alone, the Council's President, Mr H N Harilela, wrote to the Secretary of State asking that non-Chinese BDTC's in Hong Kong be given British citizenship
3. The main concern of the ethnic minorities in Hong Kong is that they might become stateless after 1997 because:
(a) the Chinese memorandum associated with the Joint Declaration makes no provision for the ethnic minorities to become Chinese nationals;
(b) the new status of British National (Overseas) which was created under the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Order 1986 is not transmissable to the holder's children;
(c) as the law stands, the ethnic minorities have no means of proving that they have taken Hong Kong as their place of permanent residence in order to qualify for right of abode in Hong Kong under Article 24(4) of the draft Basic Law.
4. In recognition of the potential vulnerability of the ethnic minorities after 1997, the Government have already taken the following measures to safeguard their position:
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