A Hong Kong court on Tuesday sentenced a mainland Chinese woman to eight months in jail for lying about her pregnancy upon her entry into the territory, as measures to limit mainland births are stepped up.
The 26-year-old woman entered Hong Kong late last month, when she was 38 weeks pregnant, after she produced a fake medical certificate that claimed she had completed 28 weeks of pregnancy, a government statement said.
At the border, the woman said she came to Hong Kong for sightseeing, but checks revealed she had previously been turned back by authorities in June for not having a hospital booking.
The woman was again denied entry, but she reported sick and was subsequently admitted to hospital. She gave birth 10 days later.
“Under the laws of Hong Kong, any person who makes false representation to an immigration officer commits an offense,” an immigration department spokesman said about the eight months sentence.
“The immigration department will continue to step up checking at control points to prevent non-local pregnant women who do not have confinement booking from coming to Hong Kong,” he said.
The southern Chinese territory of seven million people has been struggling to cope with tens of thousands of mainland Chinese women who arrive yearly to give birth, thereby gaining residency rights for their children.
Mainlanders accounted for nearly half of Hong Kong’s 88,000 births in 2010, prompting an outcry over shortages of beds in maternity wards and the soaring cost of childbirth in the former British colony.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英) said in April that he would ban pregnant mainlanders whose husbands were not from Hong Kong, dubbed “double negatives,” from giving birth in local hospitals starting next year.
And in May, authorities warned expectant mothers from the mainland against rushing to emergency wards without prior bookings, saying they were putting their babies’ lives at risk.
The government set a quota of 31,000 mainland mothers in private hospitals this year and 3,400 at state hospitals.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
RSS