SEAD and UND concur.
CONFIDENTIAL
Background and Argument
SCORRI Report
3. The Government's reply to the SCORRI Report "Refugees
and
Asylum,
Reference
to
the
of
The
with Special
Vietnamese", published last September, accepted SCORRI's recommendation that "family reunion criteria be relaxed in respect Vietnamese in camps in countries of temporary asylum". Reply estimated that some 420 refugees in Hong Kong would qualify under
under the relaxed criteria. Over 350 had arrived
by end-June.
resettlement 420
should have arrived by end-August.
At the
present rate
of
4. SCORRI also recommended that:
"If necessary, and as part of burden-sharing
of a
agreement, Britain should accept a small share of those who are hard to resettle and have spent
years in camps.
The Government's reply was:
"HMG
are prepared
to
consider
addition to the family reunion
accepting,
in
cases,
further
limited numbers of Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong. A decision on this will be taken in the
light of the willingness
shown by
other
resettlement countries to respond to Hong Kong's needs and of all the circumstances at the time.
5.
This
heavily-qualified
the
formula
then Home
was
extracted
with
Secretary,
who was
great difficulty from
against any such commitment. We had originally sought a more far-reaching commitment which would have involved our acceptance of 500 refugees per annum, 420 family reunion
in addition to the
cases. We had argued that this would
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