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