British Parliament rejects China’s call to halt HK inquiry

London —Britain and China are caught in a diplomatic row over Beijing’s handling of Hong Kong affairs and an ongoing British Parliament inquiry into the implementation of the agreement on the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China that both sides reached 30 years ago.

Beijing has said the inquiry is interference in its domestic affairs and wants it to be stopped.

However, the chairman of the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee said yesterday that its Members of Parliament would not be heeding the Chinese calls. “We are not stopping the inquiry. We met yesterday afternoon and decided to continue,” Mr Richard Ottaway told Reuters.

His committee launched an inquiry in July to examine the implementation of the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from the UK to China.

Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997 under a 1984 pact that provided for the city to keep its wide-ranging freedoms and autonomy under the “one country, two systems” model. The joint declaration also stated that personal rights in the territory must be enshrined by law.

In July, UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said Britain would mobilise the international community and pursue avenues available if China breached the agreement.

The British inquiry comes at a sensitive time for China, which on Sunday rejected demands for Hong Kong’s next leader to be freely chosen in 2017.

Instead, Beijing would retain control over which two or three candidates can stand in the election via a nominating committee. The announcement led to scores of protesters taking to the streets, while pro-democracy leaders announced the start of an “era of civil disobedience”.

A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry made it clear yesterday that Beijing was unhappy about the UK’s inquiry. “Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China. On the matter of political reform, it is an internal affair of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; it is China’s internal affair. (We) will not allow foreign forces to intervene,” said the spokesman.

The BBC reported that Beijing had tried to block the inquiry through parliamentary and diplomatic channels. The Foreign Affairs Committee of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) had written to its British counterpart, warning it to drop the probe, while the Chinese Ambassador also discouraged UK parliamentarians from taking part in it.

In its letter, the NPC said the inquiry had “sent a wrong political signal to the outside world and disrupted Hong Kong’s political reform”, the BBC said. China would “brook no interference, either directly or indirectly, from the UK or any other external forces”, the letter added. The inquiry would also “have a negative impact on the relations between our countries”.

Mr Ottaway denied he was interfering in China’s domestic politics. “My job is to see whether Britain is living up to its side of the undertakings and, secondly, if China isn’t living up to its undertakings, then what is the British government doing about it,” he said.

“This is not interfering in the internal affairs of China — that would be completely inappropriate.”

The Chinese Embassy in Britain could not be immediately reached for comment. AGENCIES