CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign and Commonwealth Office London SW1
Telephone 01-
Your reference
HE Mr DHT Hildyard CMG DFC
UKMIS GENEVA
Our reference
HKK 14/5
LAST
REF
118)
Date 23 July 1974
244
152
NEW
REF.
Dear Hills and,
SOUTH VIETNAMESE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS IN HONG KONG
1.
In your letter UN 2/12 of 10 July, addressed to Bill Squire in SEAD, you enclosed a copy of a Note handed to you by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and asked for advice on a reply.
2.
I attach a copy of a written answer given on 10 July by Mr Hattersley to a Parliamentary Question put down by Mr James Johnson MP. This gives the facts succinctly and is worded to expose a minimum of surface. In your reply to the High Commissioner for Refugees I suggest you keep to the same line. Incidentally the one man not sent back claimed to have a birth certificate showing that he was born in Hong Kong. He has subsequently established his right to stay there.
3.
You will however wish to have some background information about the case, leaving it to you to decide how much of it to pass on to the High Commissioner. As you can imagine the affair has caused us and Hong Kong a good deal of difficulty. We have had representa- tions from a number of MPs and from Amnesty International. There has been quite a lot of press coverage, some of it tendentious and distorted. If Hong Kong had allowed these illegal immigrants to stay, it would have encouraged others to follow. Hong Kong is already subject to considerable pressures of population on its social services. None of the group had any evidence that any other country was prepared to accept them. Amnesty claimed that certain countries, such as France, would do so; but when the Embassy in Paris asked the Quai d'Orsay about this they said they knew nothing of the matter. the group had been allowed to stay whilst we, or the Hong Kong Government, or the High Commissioner for Refugees or anyone else sought sanctuary for them elsewhere, this too would have encouraged others to follow them in the belief that they too would have a soft option of either staying in Hong Kong or being found somewhere else to go.
4.
If
The South Vietnamese Government were of course anxious to get the group back. To that end they gave us a series of assurances in Hong Kong, Saigon and London that nothing serious would happen on their return. The South Vietnamese Government have since, however,
/tried to
CONFIDENTIAL