Some 35 000 overseas British citizen of Asian origin living in east Africa are to be granted the right to settle in Britain, Home Secretary David Blunkett told Wednesday’s Guardian newspaper.
Full citizenship will be given to people who worked with the British colonial authorities in countries like Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, but they are now elderly and it is unlikely many will want to move to Britain, the Guardian said.
Blunkett told the broadsheet that Britain had a ”moral obligation” to right the wrongs done to them by an earlier British government.
Overseas citizenship was awarded to Asians living in Africa who did not hold Indian or Pakistani citizenship because they had been living outside the countries since before their partition in 1948.
The status was granted in the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, passed in the wake of anti-immigration protests in Britain.
But when African nationalist regimes — including that of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin — came to power, such people discovered that their citizenship did not give them the right to settle in Britain.
Whites in similar circumstances were given full British passports.
Blunkett told the newspaper: ”Overseas British citizen status is a legacy of decolonialisation, when some overseas citizens were treated unfairly, which was then compounded by the 1968 immigration act.
”The government is acting to put right these wrongs. We have a moral obligation to these people that goes back a long way.”
Blunkett will officially announce the change later on Wednesday, the Guardian said. – Sapa-AFP