In Hong Kong, about 2.9 million people are eligible for British overseas passports
As BBC notes, according to established global practice, countries that pursued colonial policies from the Middle Ages granted independence to their colonies in the 19th-20th centuries and gave their citizenship to residents of those countries.
For example, Spain grants dual citizenship to residents of former colonies in South America, while natives of other former colonies could obtain permanent residency after two years of living in the country. At least 300,000 residents of Suriname moved to the Netherlands when the country granted independence to that South American state. Portugal left Macau (now a special administrative region of China), leaving the opportunity to obtain its passport to anyone who wanted it.
Sometimes former colonizers took measures to reduce migration from the colonies. For example, France from 1830 to 1946 granted citizenship only to those residents of North African colonies who renounced Islam. In 115 years, for example, no more than six thousand people in Algeria were willing to do so. After World War II, France abandoned this rule.
“It is very important to understand that people who were given such citizenship did not move anywhere,” says citizenship expert Professor Dimitri Kochenkov of the University of Groningen (Netherlands). “In most cases, they only needed a passport that protects them and allows them to travel freely around the world.”
In the first half of the 20th century, the UK freely granted citizenship to citizens of former colonies — the country was developing and needed labor. This is how the largest communities of Indians and Pakistanis in Europe appeared here. However, since the 1960s, legislation began to tighten, and in a rather peculiar way.
The UK developed several types of passports: a regular citizen passport and several varieties of overseas territory resident passports. Formally, such a passport granted citizenship, but in fact its holder had no more rights than an ordinary tourist: they could not stay in the Kingdom for more than six months and could not work.
These passports spread during the 1960s-80s. Exceptions were made only for territories where the UK had conflicts. Thus, residents of Gibraltar (a territorial dispute with Spain) or the Falkland Islands (an armed conflict with Argentina) received full British passports.
“The UK is the only country in the world that does not allow its own citizens, as it were, to settle on its territory. The reason is racism, and this is not even my opinion, that’s what the court decided,” says Kochenkov, citing as an example a decision of the European Commission (the precursor to the European Court of Human Rights) issued in 1975. Several dozen residents of Uganda and Kenya, who had Asian roots, faced threats and manifestations of intolerance and decided to move to the UK using Overseas Territories passports. Britain refused them — and the court ruled that this was illegal and violated their basic rights.
In the 1980s, the UK and China entered an active phase of negotiations on the status of Hong Kong, which had been a British colony since 1842. By the end of the 20th century, the way of life, level of rights and freedoms, judicial and financial systems there were fundamentally different from mainland China.
In 1997, Hong Kong (like Macau before it) became a special administrative region of China with much broader powers. However, from 1986 to 1997, the UK authorities adopted several legislative acts, each aimed at one thing — preventing about 3.5 million Hong Kong residents from moving there. The law denied citizenship even to spouses of British citizens.
“The richest were given full British passports, the rest — overseas territory resident passports,” Kochenkov states. He says this step was supposedly taken so as not to anger China during negotiations on Hong Kong's status. Although previous similar negotiations with Portugal on the status of Macau did not cause any protests from Beijing.
Hong Kong residents were very unhappy with this decision — in the 1990s, mass protests against such discrimination took place in the territory, but then Britain did not meet the residents halfway.
Kochenkov is a co-author of the annual ranking of citizenships of the world. It takes into account the size of each country's economy, the number of countries citizens can travel to without a visa, and the number of countries where citizens can settle without going through full immigration procedures. In this ranking, the UK passport ranks eighth, and the overseas territory resident passport ranks 129th. This is the level of Tajikistan or poor African countries.
When China passed a law sharply expanding the powers of its security services in Hong Kong, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson published an article in the Times newspaper saying that Hong Kongers would now be able to obtain real United Kingdom passports. In particular, he wrote that Britain “cannot simply shrug its shoulders and walk away,” it “will fulfill its duty” and do so “of its own free will.”
In fact, this means that the country's government will have to repeal its own laws and adopt directly opposite ones.