On March 26, 1949, the US State Department issued a circular stating that the Baltic states were still independent nations with their own diplomatic representatives. In Canada the official list of diplomats included the offices of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that in the early 1960s caused the Soviet Embassy in Canada to refuse to receive the lists distributed by the Canadian Department of External Affairs. Eventually, the UK excluded the Baltic diplomats from the Diplomatic List, but as a compromise Baltic diplomats continued to be accepted as possessing a diplomatic character by His/Her Majesty's Governments. The UN received numerous appeals from the Baltic diplomatic missions, Baltic refugee organizations, resistance groups in Baltic countries and the US diplomats and policy makers concerning the Baltic question. Due to the presence of the USSR in the Security Council the questions were never raised on the official agenda of the UN. A joint appeal to the UN was made by the resistance groups in Baltic countries calling the United Nations to denounce the Soviet occupation that resulted in the 1983 resolution of the European Parliament on the restoration of Baltic independence. Baltic assets 1940–1991 After the invasion of Denmark and Norway by Nazi Germany on 9 April 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8389, under which the United States Department of the Treasury froze all financial assets of occupied European countries in the US. After the Soviet Occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Executive Order 8389 was extended to the assets and properties of the three Baltic countries. During the first Soviet occupation in July 1940, the United States issued Executive Order 8484 which froze Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian financial assets, including gold reserve. The freezing of Baltic assets by the US was condemned by the Soviet Union, and it was declared that there should not be any legal basis for delaying the transfer of the Baltic gold from the US Federal Reserve to the State Bank of the Soviet Union. Gold reserves Estonia, Latvia and Estonia also kept gold reserves in banks in the United Kingdom. In July 1940 the Bank of England sequestrated the Baltic gold reserves deposited in the UK, partly as a retaliation of the nationalisation of British owned property in the Baltic countries by the USSR, but also because Britain considered annexation of the three countries unlawful. During the 1950s the USSR claimed the gold regularly but