326 8607
P.14
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TRANSCRIPT D: FORRIGE SEC P.C. HONG KONG 16 JAN 90
PORRIGN SECRETARY (COFTD):
I am all in favour of that; but the trouble is that people
who are screened out, who after the screening it has been
established are not refugees, are by and large not volunteering and
therefore it was because the volunteering programme was not coping
to any extent with those who it has been established were not
refugees that I felt bound to agree that the Government of Hong Kong
should repatriate a plane-load before Christmas.
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No date has been fixed for future plane-loads but I do not
see anything on the immediate horizon which would enable us to alter
that policy, not because we love the policy of repatriation it is
an extremely difficult one but because I do not see at the moment
another way of making it clear that moving from Vietnam to Hong Kong
is not a road to resettlement in the West and to a happier life.
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QUESTION (RADIO HONG KONG):
Some OMELCO members have ointed out that the suggestion of a
two-chamber system for a future legislature will make convergency
impossible. Will Britain request China not to adopt this model of
legislature until 1997?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
I think it is true that there has been such close
concentration on the opening numbers for 1991 in the constitutional
reform that other parts of it, other aspects of it, have not perhaps
received all the attention they might have by the public, but the