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Hon Lydia Dunn
Su, going back to the answer to my supplementary question, what are the
implications of such a situation to the community and what options
are available to the Government to deal with such a situation ?
Secretary for Security
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Sir I must stress in answer to my Led Friend that HK has accepted Sir, I
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a role as a place of first asylum.
The implications of this
is that we accept refugees as they arrive,it is absolutely
conditional on other countries taking them off our hands for the
purposes of resettlement.
If we felt we were building up a hard-
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core that none of the resettlement countries appear to be prepared to accept, then with the aid of UNHCR we would put as much pressure as we possibly could on resettlent countries
and just continue applying this pressure to them.
We have ourselves
in already absorbed 14,000 peryle from Vietnam since the fall of
Saigon and in world terms per head of population my guess is that this
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is the best performance so far of anywhere, I do not think we could
in any way be expected to absorb any more into our own community.
Mr Charles. Yeung
Sir, in respect of the term of refuress, since the Secretary's reply to the second part of the question as that there were some
arrivals from Vietnam who are not actually refugees by status,
would Government consider repatriating such elements back to Vietnam.
Secretary for Security.
I do not actually recall at any stage saying that none of these
people from Vietnam were refugees. The fact of the matter is that
returning the refugees to Vietnam is fraught with enormous
difficulties.
am?
Nevertheless in conjunction with the British Government
:
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