ETIAND
Recommendation 5:
(i)
Britain's willingness to relax
to relax its family reunion criteria
for Vietnamese
in
camp s in countries of temporary asylum
as a bargaining counter to attract offers of resettlement places from other countries.
should be used
additional
(ii) The aim of such negotiations should be to reduce drastically the size of Hong Kong's Vietnamese refugee
population and to resettle all those whose stay
in camp s
has been prolonged.
रं
1.
HMG share the view of the Sub-Committee that acceptance of a
new intake of refugees from Hong Kong by Britain could evoke an
increased response
from the major resettlement countries and
thus help to resolve Hong Kong's Vietnamese refugee problem. In
their memorandum submitted to the Sub-Committee the FCO made
clear their belief that the effect of the UK accepting a further
quota might be to encourage other countries to tak e more. The re
can obviously be no guarantee of this, but such a view would
se em to be supported, as the Sub-Committee's report notes, by
the responses from the United States Government and the
Australian Government, and
also that from the United Nations
High Commissioner
Refugees (UNHCR).
Subsequent
representatives have reinforced this
for
conversations with UNHCR
view.
2.
Our
agreement
to take an
additional
number of Vietname se
refugees into the United Kingdom c an clearly be used as an argument to persuade other countries to make offers of additional
resettlement places. HMG do not underestimate the difficulties
of achieving such an outcome, since these countries do not owe US
anything in this
this respect. Many countries have already assisted generously with the resettlement
resettlement of refugees from Hong Kong and
HMG and HKG are grateful for this help. The FCO will, however,
press other countries as actively as possible, both bilaterally
and multilaterally, in order to maximise the impact of our latest
In particular, approaches will be made to those
that already take large numbers of refugees
decision.
countries
from