RESTRICTED
295
Foreign and Commonwealth Office London SW1A 2AH
Telephone 01- 233 5073
Migit
par. 2821
R S Gorham Esq
HELSINKI
Your reference
нак 243li
Our reference
Date
25 November 1982
Dea Robin,
ᄀ
Af 20 111
26
RESETTLEMENT OF VIETNAMESE REFUGEES
1. Thank you for your useful letter of 27 September on the Finns decision to take more Vietnamese refugees (as well, incidentally, as the copy I saw last week of your interesting letter to Hanoi about Nguyen Co Thach's recent visit).
2. While we would not normally press you to follow up this Finnish decision or press them to do more - 25 handicapped refugees and their dependants is a major additional commitment to a very small refugee programme - we have been asked by Hong Kong to do what we can to persuade resettlement countries to give priority if possible to taking their Vietnamese boat people.
3. As you probably know arrivals in Hong Kong this year look like being as high as ever (the seasonal peak in July was indeed higher than last year or the year before), despite the general decline in numbers of boat people. But departures to resettlement countries are proving much slower, and 40% of the 12,700 currently in Hong Kong have been there over two years. Many of these will be difficult cases (a large proportion of refugees who would probably not go anywhere else were included in our quota of 10,000 which we opened in 1979, but this was filled at the end of 1981 and we are most unlikely to be able to do more in this way).
4.
Hong Kong is worried they will end up with an embarrassing residue of unresettleable cases, It is fully accepted that they could not possibly consider settling them there. Indeed no S E Asian country of first asylum currently accepts any settlement, but in Hong Kong's case the already dense population and the difficulty of doing more for Vietnamese than they can do for the dependants of their existing Chinese community certainly put this out of the question.
5. It is not clear whether the selection of the 25 handicapped Vietnamese is in the hands of the Finns or UNHCR. But I should be grateful if you could put it to the Finns that they
RESTRICTED
/might