BUSABO (5)
determine whether they are refugees or simply economic migrants. The camp population in Hong Kong now stands at over 56,000, of whom 12,300 are refugees and the bulk of the remainder await screening. Results of the screening process, which is supervised by UNHCR, so far indicate that 90% of new arrivals are economic migrants.
At the International Conference on Indo-Chinese Refugees in Geneval in June, all countries of first asylum agreed to introduce screening, thus ending the era of automatic resettlement. As part of this process, Britain undertook to settle a further 2000 refugees from Hong Kong. Resettlement countries pledged to resettle all the Vietnamese refugees in the South east Asian Region over the next
three years.
It was agreed that all those screened out, as economic migrants, should return to Vietnam. But there remains the problem of how to achieve this in practice. The Geneva Conference agreed
that a voluntary programme should be tried in the first instance, but results from Hong Kong have so far been disappointing: only 874 volunteers have returned so far. Since Geneva the British Government have been working to secure arrangements which would enable those people who do not qualify as refugees and have no prospect of resettlement to return to Vietnam without fear of persecution. The first group of people to be repatriated involuntarily were returned to Vietnam on 12 December.