布政司署
CONFIDENTIAL
香港下亞區畢道
*** OUR REF.: CR 2/4821/75 V
來函檔號 YOUR REF.1
L C W Figg Esq CMG
Migration & Visa Department
F CO
Der Figy,
VIETNAMESE REFUGEES
||
ones Prospeak'
in! 2018.
MUD
GOVERNMENT SECRETARIAT,
LOWER ALBERT ROAD
HONG KONG
22 August, 1978
POLVED IN REGISTRY No. 25 ZO AG1978
A.
Please refer to the High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur's letter to you of 25 July about Vietnamese refugees in Malaysia and his suggestion that some 150 small-boat refugees from Malaysia might be offered resettlement in the
UK.
2.
At
We certainly appreciate that the Malaysians and the UNHCR would welcome help from the UK in achieving a wider international response to the problem of Vietnamese refugees in Malaysia. However, we should like to put down a marker about the problem in Hong Kong. As you will know from copies of separate correspondence, the numbers arriving here have risen very sharply in recent months, partly because we maintain an extremely generous policy - allowing all refugees on junks to land for processing by UNHCR and also those rescued by ocean-going vessels whose first scheduled port of call after picking up the refugees is Hong Kong. present there are over 2,300 refugees here awaiting resettle- ment: I believe we now have the unenviable distinction of having overtaken Thailand in the number of boat refugees and are second only to Malaysia. We therefore hope that the great majority of any refugees accepted by the UK (apart from those rescued by UK-registered vessels) would be from Hong Kong. It would certainly be seen here as incomprehensible if the UK should not devote most of the help which it can. give to an area for which she maintains direct responsibility. That said, we welcome the idea in principle of as many countries as possible making contributions to solving the refugee problem throughout the region. We therefore hope that any small gesture which might be made to Malaysia would be complemented by efforts to persuade countries already taking refugees from Malaysia, but not from Hong Kong, to contribute to an international solution of the problem here.
Yours ever,
Iain c.or
(I C Orr)
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