Can Britain keep its word?

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 7/8/2020 2:07:04 PM

We will grant BNOs five years’ limited leave to remain (in the United Kingdom), with the right to work or study,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the UK Parliament on July 1. “After five years, they will be able to apply for settled status. After a further twelve months, with settled status, they will be able to apply for citizenship.” The stunning thing about this promise is that it applies to all three million people in Hong Kong — almost half the population of the city — who have British National Overseas(BNO) status by virtue of having been born there before the former British colony was handed back to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. They don’t even need to have an actual BNO passport (as 3,00,000 of them do). All three million of them qualify: “All those with BNO status will be eligible, as will their family dependents who are ordinarily resident in Hong Kong. The Home Office will put in place a simple, streamlined application process. There will be no quota on numbers.” This is an unprecedented commitment and it’s not even a legal requirement. Britain voluntarily gave asylum to 30,000 Ugandan Asians in 1972 when the dictator Idi Amin confiscated their property and expelled them from the country. But we’re talking about potentially a hundred times as many people in Hong Kong. It is a debt of honour, however, as Britain negotiated an agreement with China that Hong Kong would keep the rule of law, free speech and freedom of the Press for 50 years after the handover in 1997. China has broken that “one country, two systems” deal, and Hong Kongers can only expect a thinly-disguised Communist dictatorship from now on. It’s right there in the new “security” laws imposed illegally last month by the regime’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress in Beijing. New crimes include separatism, subversion, terrorism and “collusion with foreign forces”, the same vague catch-all charges that the Communist regime uses to suppress dissent in the People’s Republic. The maximum sentence for these “crimes” is ten years in prison. These laws will be enforced by China’s “security” (i.e. political) police, who will now operate in Hong Kong. The charges they bring may be tried in Hong Kong’s courts, but if there are “certain circumstances” or “special situations” the accused can be extradited to mainland courts, entirely under the regime’s thumb, where the conviction rate is well above 99 per cent. In other words, it’s over. The police now hoists a purple sign warning protesters that their chants could be criminal. Along major roads throughout the city, neon-coloured flags hailing a new era of stability and prosperity stand erect as soldiers. It’s not just freedom that’s over. As Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last British Governor, wrote recently: “If China destroys the rule of law in Hong Kong, it will ruin the city’s chances of continuing to be a great international financial hub that mediates about two-thirds of the direct investment in and out of China.”

 

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