UNCLASSIFIED
Department, made the suggestion that one way of handling those who
had several years to wait before being resettled would be to find
temporary (e.g. 3 to 4 years) migrant work for them in a third
country, e.q. in the Middle East.)
Highlights
4.
The following more detailed points are worth recording:-
a) Hong Kong. Rita Fan and Hui Yin Fat both made verv
effective contributions which plaved a part in achieving the
realistic conclusions on screening. Rita Fan gave an important
speech in plenary in which, with great effect, she allowed the
figures of increasing arrivals and decreasing departures to speak
for themselves. Both she and Hui made it clear on several occasions
that LeqCo had rejected push-backs but favoured screening as the
most humane solution to a problem which was of others' making.
It is worth noting the presence at the conference of a rather
nushy lady called Tuyet-Nguyet. She is a Vietnamese living in
Hong Kong, apparently a journalist and a leading light in the
refugee movement, though neither Rita Fan nor Hui had heard of her.
She argued that the closed camps in Hong Kong should be opened so
that those in them could seek work and was concerned that Hong Kong
might introduce a policy of treating all new arrivals as illegal
immigrants.
b) UNHCR. There were two UNHCR speakers, Sascha Casella,
adviser at the High Commissioner's office in Geneva and
Susan Timberlake, described as protection officer from the UNHCR
office in Washington. They were both prone to agonising about the
difficulties of finding humane solutions to the problems faced by
countries of first asylum. Casella said that there was no single
solution to the problem and declined to offer any definitive
answers. He thought that there was no such thing as humane
deterrence, though he accepted the principle of screening and argued
at one point that not screening when faced with arrivals such as
teenage illiterate fishermen from North Vietnam itself eroded the
principle of first asylum. Susan Timberlake amonised over the
difficulty of defining a refugee. An element was lack of choice in