Hong Kong Special Administrative Region passport holders can only hold one valid passport at any one time, Secretary for Security John Lee said today.

Mr Lee told reporters that in handling a passport replacement, immigration officers will ask an applicant to surrender their HKSAR passport and cancel it, before giving them a new passport together with the old, cancelled one.

He said if the old passport contains a valid visa, despite its cancellation, an HKSAR passport holder will have to produce it and the new passport to show he or she has a valid travel document as well as a valid visa for the immigration officials of a particular country to check.

Mr Lee noted immigration officers of that country will record the documents according to their own procedures.

“If you talk about the immigration record of a particular person for a long period of time, it is very natural that the record will show that the person might have used more than one passport, because the record indicates what passport a person uses during that period of validity,” he added.

In response to media enquiries related to a Hong Kong permanent resident holding more than one HKSAR passport, the Immigration Department said it reviewed the relevant records and confirmed that the assessment, issuance and cancellation of the person's passports had been performed strictly according to the relevant laws and regulations.

The department said it has all along been working in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations, adding it has a comprehensive system to ensure HKSAR passports are issued in an effective and accurate manner.