8,142 HK residents face statelessness

The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin examines the problem of statelessness which will face an estimated 8,142 Hong Kong residents when China becomes the sovereign power on July 1, 1997.

HONG KONG (JP): With 354 days to go before Hong Kong becomes part of China, the British have finally established that an estimated 8,142 non-Chinese will face statelessness at the time of the handover.

The largest group by far among the dispossessed are 3,252 Indians, or 39.9 percent, but those threatened have ethnic origins in 78 countries -- and even include 16 Indonesians.

While there has been a slightly increased degree of concern for them in recent statements by British politicians, all 8,142 face an uncertain and emotionally upsetting future as a result of the transition from British to Chinese rule.

Essentially, those facing statelessness are pincered by the essentially racial visions which China and Britain inject into their respective nationality laws.

Under Chinese law, all Hong Kong Chinese will become citizens of China at the stroke of midnight on June 30, 1997. There are evidently no provisions in that law for persons who are non- Chinese residents to become Chinese.

Under British nationality law, all Hong Kong residents who were born here as British subjects, whether Chinese or non- Chinese, have long ago ceased to enjoy the right to be full British citizens in Britain. All that Britain has granted the three million or so former British subjects is a British National Overseas passport which will enable them to travel after the handover, but without any right of abode in Britain.

The Hong Kong Chinese do not necessarily like this prospect -- which is why so many have sought to obtain the passports of other foreign countries. Whether, and to what extent, China will respect the foreign passports which Hong Kong Chinese have acquired is but one of many uncertainties associated with the handover. But at least the Hong Kong Chinese will have a nationality from July 1st 1997, as citizens of China.

All non-Chinese former British subjects -- the "ethnic minorities" as they are referred to here -- will have British travel documents but no country to call their own. All this was obvious when the Sino-British joint declaration on the future of Hong Kong was signed in 1984.

Instead of seeking to reassure Hong Kong people as a whole by quickly resolving this problem for a small number of people, the British preferred to increase anxiety for everyone through their procrastination.

Indicative of the moral cowardice with which the British have approached this small but important footnote to their Empire, it is only now that the figures have been produced that the obvious has emerged: those facing statelessness are small in number.

The British are in absolutely no danger of being flooded by a new wave of immigrants such as that which once arrived from Uganda. But irrational fears of such a flood have long motivated London's policy towards Hong Kong's nationality problems.

Given a little moral courage, plus a willingness to honor British international treaty commitments not to increase statelessness, the problem could be quickly resolved.

One motive for British procrastination may have been the hope that the problem would begin to go away. The figures now released indicate this hope has been realized. Some of those faced with the prospect of statelessness have been able to obtain foreign passports, including roughly 700 who have obtained British passports under another scheme. A few have died. So whereas there were 11,585 potentially stateless persons in Hong Kong in 1986, the number has now been reduced to a current 8,009. It is estimated to rise to 8,142 persons by the time of the handover next year.

Altogether 4,646 out of the 8,009 come from five South Asian nations - India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal.

Since 1986, the number of ethnic Portuguese (some of whom are Eurasian) facing statelessness in Hong Kong has been reduced dramatically from 2,255 to 747. Almost certainly, this reduction is due to the fact that the Portuguese government has been far more generous in granting full citizenship to most of its citizens in Macau than the British have been to their former citizens in Hong Kong.

There is an irony here. Portugal and Britain are both members of the European Union. With their Portuguese passports, the Macanese can go and live in Britain if they so desire, a privilege denied to former Hong Kong Chinese British citizens with their BNO passports.

Whether these figures will finally spur some belated British effort to end the threat of statelessness remains in doubt.

When he visited Hong Kong earlier this year, British Prime Minister John Major promised that the ethnic minorities could come to Britain "if forced to leave Hong Kong".

Subsequently the Labor Shadow Foreign Secretary Robin Cook went a little further and promised a right of abode to those threatened with statelessness.

The British stopped short of promising British passports to the stateless, as of right, in part because officials fear that the numbers of affected persons could become "self-inflating".

As Hong Kong Governor Christopher Patten put it last week, there is a concern "that some people who do actually have another passport, maybe an Indian or Pakistani passport, will, if they get a hint of being able to get a British passport through another scheme, forget about their other passport and claim that they are stateless".

But now that a number for the stateless has been produced, it should be bureaucratically possible, as Patten puts it, "to ring- fence the number".

Meanwhile, in a further fascinating footnote to Empire, it appears that were the British to be belatedly generous in solving this problem, they would be giving their passports to be veritable mini-United Nations which still resides within Hong Kong.

Currently there are 2,677 "others" on the list of ethnic minorities -- people who reside here by virtue of their devalued British passport, and not because of any document granted by their country of ethnic origin.

The Indians, Pakistanis and Portuguese are the three main groups, but an amazing 75 countries are listed as comprising the "others". These are all persons residing in Hong Kong by virtue of being a "British Dependent Territory Citizen" (BDTC), formerly holding a BDTC passport, and now a BNO one.

The "others" include 16 Indonesians, 26 Japanese, seven Russians, 18 Germans, 15 South Koreans, 11 Jamaicans, five Brazilians, 41 Australians and 309 Filipinos.

Precisely how the 16 non-Chinese Indonesians became British colonial subjects here is something of a mystery. There are stateless Indonesian Chinese in Hong Kong -- Indonesian Chinese who lost their citizenship when they returned to China in the 1960s, and then subsequently fled China and came to Hong Kong. But those Indonesians will also automatically become citizens of China next July -- which is precisely why some of them are very fearful. They remember China at its worst, during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

The Japanese BDTCs are a mystery, too. Conceivably, some of the 26 may be victims of the old rule whereby Japanese fathers in mixed marriages could pass on their Japanese nationality, but Japanese mothers in mixed marriages could not.

At least when the British behave unjustly, they do not discriminate. Topping the list of BDTC "others" are no less than 392 persons whose "ethnic origins" lie in the United Kingdom -- but who are also due to become stateless, along with everybody else.