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inescapable. Our view is that if the Secretary of State did wish to proceed with the proposal, the Diplomatic Wing should approach the Treasury in order to seek the necessary funds from the Central Reserve.
4.
You mentioned that in view of the Secretary of State's concern over the likelihood of a major refugee influx in the summer your intention was to put a submission to him soon. My own feeling was that this should set out a range of options, particularly our reactions above. I should be grateful to have a sight of the submission at the draft stage.
5. You also mentioned one further possibility. So far UNHCR has declined to become involved in the detention centre proposal, presumably because they do not regard such activity as coming within their mandate. They might, however, be pursuaded to become involved if the expected influx of refugees was to be treated as an emergency situation which did come within their mandate. Were that to be so your proposal was that we should contribute refugee relief funds through UNHCR as we did earlier this year for their existing programmes in Hong Kong.
6.
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It remains to be seen whether UNHCR could be so pursuaded. Our initial reaction to this idea is I fear a very negative one. As I have already explained, we simply do not have the funds even if we agreed to do more for other than a very modest further contribution to UNHCR's programmes in Hong Kong. Moreover, we would still see great difficulty over defending the use of aid funds in this way. In our view it is most unlikely that such a device would deflect the kind of public and Parliamentary criticism to which I have already referred.
Joher Machen Пасвим
JC Machin
Information Department and
Disaster and Refugee Units
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