Immigration Dept Blamed For Unregistered Births

An investigation by the Ombudsman has revealed there were 151 cases of unregistered births between 1990 and May 2015, with some youngsters only having their births registered at the age of 20 and seven mothers having failed to register the births of more than one child.

The Ombudsman initiated the investigation after the tragic death of a 15-year-old girl in April 2015. She plunged from a luxury Repulse Bay flat where she lived with her Filipino mother and British father. It was later discovered that the girl and her younger sister were born in Hong Kong but their parents had never registered their births.

The Ombudsman says it is indeed worrying to think about what those innocent children had gone through in their childhood, how they received education and participated in group activities, and what their future would be, and especially for those who didn't have their births registered until they were 20 or almost 20.

The Ombudsman didn't reveal exactly how many such cases there were, but it said there were a total of 151 cases between January 1990 and May 2015 in which a baby’s birth remained unregistered after more than a year when compared to within 42 days required by law.

The Ombudsman says the number was astounding and criticised senior Immigration management for failing to perform their monitoring duties diligently.

The Immigration Department is supposed to send three reminders by mail to parents at different stages should they continue to fail to register the birth of their child. But the Ombudsman found no reminders have been sent in nearly half of the cases, saying the situation was appalling, and that its follow-up procedures were tantamount to inaction.

The department had never investigated the cases, let alone instituted prosecutions until the Ombudsman stepped in. The Office describes the monitoring by the department as feeble and ineffective and the extent of its inaction was startling, adding that it can hardly escape blame for failing to step in and rectify such malfeasance of inaction.

Most of those unregistered birth cases involved complicated family problems; some mothers were afraid of revealing their identities as overstayers, some even denied having given birth to their babies.

Of the 151 cases, in 30 cases the mother was in breach of the conditions of stay. There were also seven mothers who failed to register the births of more than one child, and these cases involved 16 children in total. The Ombudsman says Immigration should be able to spot such problems.

But the Ombudsman did praise the Immigration Department for introducing a new mechanism for tracing such unregistered cases a month after the tragic death of a 15-year-old girl in 2015. Under the new mechanism, there were 401 cases of unregistered births of at least six months after birth by the end of 2017. The Immigration investigated 104 of them and prosecuted either the father or mother in 35 of those cases.