124
T DRAKLICH
HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
10 March 1993
香港立法局
一九九三年三月十日
124
Mr President, the plight of the ethnic minorities deserves our full sympathy and support. The British Government should not be allowed to escape from its moral responsibility. I call on this Council to speak with one voice as we embark on the difficult course of fighting for the rights of this small and vulnerable group in our community. Mr President, I beg to
move.
Question on the motion proposed.
MR HOWARD YOUNG: Mr President, first of all, I would like to thank yourself and Members for bearing with me to allow me to speak first because the proceedings of today's meeting have gone so fast that if I were to proceed to a ceremony and come back to speak last as planned, the meeting will have been finished.
I rise to support the motion, Mr President. I fully agree with what the mover of the motion has just said, namely, that we are facing an uphill battle and that we detect that the attitude of the British Government on this issue is both uncaring and niggardly.
In January, a nine-member delegation of the Co-operative Resources Centre went to London. Although the main purpose of the trip was to urge the British Government to come up with some active sincerity in order to help break the impasse on political reforms, there was another objective as well. That was to try and use the opportunity in the United Kingdom to lobby on behalf of the ethnic minorities whose situation we have fully debated in this Council. I went to the Home Office on behalf of the Co- operative Resources Centre on the last day of our trip.
First of all, I cannot say that I should complain about not being received because there was about one-half dozen of high level civil servants and also Mr Charles WARDLE, the Minister for Home Affairs who saw me on this issue. Although it was the Home Office, after sitting down for two minutes I thought for a while that I had wandered by mistake into the office of the national archives because in front of these officers they had all of the Hansard records of our debates, they had known what we had said. In fact, they pointed out what I had said in that debate supporting the issue of British citizenship for the ethnic minorities. They had all the files and all the homework exactly like the archives.
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