Hong Kong-born Nepali, 21, to speak at UN about local ethnic minorities’ fight against racism in Hong kong

HKU fresh graduate Suskihanna Gurung taking part in NGO delegation to Geneva to raise points about local school system and effect on job searches

A young woman from an ethnic minority group in Hong Kong will for the first time bring the fight against racial discrimination in education and jobs to a UNcommittee in Geneva next week.

Suskihanna Gurung, 21, who graduated from the University of Hong Kong earlier this year, will take part in an NGO delegation, meeting experts and members of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The committee will hold hearings on August 10 and 13 to assess how Hong Kong has implemented provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the city has been party to since 1965 when it was still a British colony.

It submitted its third update to the committee in April last year.

Gurung said one of the points she would raise in Geneva concerned Hong Kong’s school system, where ethnic minorities struggle with learning the Chinese language, as teachers are not equipped to teach it as a second language. This means many students Struggle with spoken Cantonese and find it difficult to obtain better-paying jobs.

Racial profiling continued to be a problem, she added.

“They see the colour of my skin and they see my ethnicity. Recently somebody told me: ‘Why don’t you join your mother in the hotel field? You can make up the beds as well’,” the journalism and literature graduate recalled.

Gurung added: “A lot of the time in Chinese media, they have news about how Nepalese men are gangsters, drug abusers and start fights with people. We also get accused of being fake refugees when we were born and raised here.”

Excluding foreign domestic helpers, ethnic minorities account for about 4 per cent of Hong Kong’s population of 7.34 million.

Earlier this year, the government announced a HK$500 million (US$63.7 million) fund for initiatives to improve the lot of the city’s non-Chinese population, though no plans have been announced. It already spends HK$200 million a year on two funding schemes so schools can help ethnic minority pupils Struggling with the Chinese Language.

But Gurung, whose grandfather came to Hong Kong as a Gurkha soldier, wants more. The city’s Race Discrimination Ordinance was enacted in 2008 and came into full operation in 2009, she pointed out, but a law on its own would not stop discrimination from happening.

“Even more important than that is to promote integration and racial harmony within society.”

Law Yuk-kai, director of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, another local NGO, said the delegation to the UN would also raise issues such as hate speech, topics relating to screening asylum seekers and refugees, human trafficking, and foreign domestic workers being forced to live with their employers.

SOURCE: HONG KONG CENSUS AND STATISTICAL DEPARTMENT