The Foreign Office is setting up a new department to administer nearly all of Britain's remaining 13 colonies.

Gibraltar is an exception

The exception is Gibraltar, which has a special position because it is part of the European Union.

But the publication of proposals to grant British citizenship to all the Overseas Territories, as they are now called, has been delayed because of differences between the Foreign Office and the Home Office.

Citizenship grievance

The handover of Hong Kong a year ago prompted a wide-ranging review of policy towards the remaining tiny British colonies - five in the Caribbean, the other eight scattered around the world.

The biggest grievance of the people in the Overseas Territories, which have varying degrees of self-government, is that their British citizenship was taken away more than 30 years ago. Only those in Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands have had the right to live in Britain restored.

Cook: government should be generous

The Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, argues that the government should be generous, especially as the total number of extra people who could conceivably come to Britain is only 130,000.

But the Home Office has raised the question of reciprocity: whether British people, and therefore any European Union citizens, should be able to go and live in Bermuda, for example. The Overseas Territories will not accept that as they fear being swamped.

The precedents are that citizenship should not be reciprocal: that is the case with Gibraltar and the Falklands, and with the French and Dutch overseas territories.

Problems over human rights

The government's White Paper, which had been expected this month, will now probably be published in September. Among the other issues it will cover the most contentious is human rights.

Britain is bound by international agreements to bring its colonies' legislation into line with its own. That will mean abolishing the death penalty and judicial corporal punishment, and legalising homosexual acts - still a crime in several Caribbean territories.