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Foreign Affairs Committee views
4.
In paragraph 4.23 of its Second Report on Hong Kong, the Foreign Affairs Committee said it believed that the British Government had an obligation to provide proper citizenship (i.e. British citizenship) to the Hong Kong ethnic minorities. This was rejected in the Government's response published in May 1990. The Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee recently wrote to the Foreign Secretary asking for a statement of the Government's current position on granting British citizenship to the ethnic minorities. The Foreign Secretary replied on
to the effect that
the Government's position remained unchanged.
The British citizenship lobby
5.
6.
Lobbying for British citizenship has been conducted either directly or on behalf of the ethnic minorities for several years now.
There have been various meetings with Ministers, petitioning of the Prime Minister and consideration of the issue by Cabinet.
Their recent
lobbying in Hong Kong led to the setting up of the LegCo sub-committee on nationality.
When the Home Secretary met a LegCo delegation on 9 June he rejected its call for a change in nationality law which would give the ethnic minorities British citizenship. At an earlier meeting with the delegation, Mr Goodlad had repeated, in
in terms of any solely British national, the immigration assurance which had been given on many occasions. The delegation affected to surprised that the assurance did not nationals who were also Chinese citizens and accused the Government of reneging on what it claimed had been
been an undertaking to all British nationals in Hong Kong. At the meeting with the Home Secretary, the delegation elicited they thought fresh confirmation that the immigration
be shocked and include British
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