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Mr Hartling said that provided Hong Kong gave asylum to refugees and
did not send them back to Vietnam, how they accommodated them was
Hong Kong's business. He did not like the barbed wire, but the treatment of refugees was satisfactory: the children for example
were well fed and healthy. However he had strong doubts as to
whether the closed camp policy was a successful deterrent. There
had been closed camps in Malaysia for years but refugees still
arrived: their overriding interest was to get out of Vietnam,
irrespective of what sort of camp they would have to live in later.
4. Mr Hartling said that there were two particular categories of
refugee which concerned him: those with UK family links and long-stayers. Many refugees who had family links in the UK but who
did not qualify for admission under our criteria were rejected by
other countries because they were regarded as our responsibility.
It would help if Britain could take these cases.
5. Mr Luce asked what would be a reasonable number of refugees for
the UK to take in order to persuade other countries to take more.
Mr Hartling said that he would not ask anyone to take all the 11,000
refugees, because of the pull factor. He would therefore not advise taking very recent arrivals. The categories to which he would give
priority were the family reunion cases and the long-stayers.
The latter totalled around 5000. Spread between the main
resettlement countries (UK, US, Canada, Australia) and even some
others (eg Finland) this would be a small number. Mr Luce asked what timescale he envisaged two years? Mr Hartling said one year would be preferable. The UK's priority might be to take the family
reunion cases and about 20% of the long-stayers (ie about 1000).
Mr Luce said that the family reunion cases were an obvious category,
though no decision had been taken yet. The difficulty was the
numbers beyond that.
Made
6. Mr Hartling said that long-stayers were destroyed as human
beings after long periods in camps and could more or less be put in
the category of handicapped refugees. Under the "Ten or More" plan,
countries were asked to take 10 or more handicapped refugees for every 200 other refugees which they accepted. This had been fairly
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