STANDARD LETTER/PARAGRAPHS
ORPHANS AND UNACCOMPANIED MINORS
Thank you for your letter of
about orphans/unaccompanied
children among the boat people in the camps in Hong Kong/about the
possibility of adopting a Vietnamese child from the boat people
camps in Hong Kong.
The unaccompanied children among the boat people form a group
requiring special attention and care. At the International
Conference on Indo Chinese Refugees, held in Geneva in June of last year, procedures were agreed which laid down guidelines for the examination of each child's claim to asylum, and directed that
decisions about their future should be taken on the basis of the
individual child's own best interests. Before I go into the detail
of this, it might be helpful if I explain some of the background to
the current situation in Hong Kong and in the region.
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After the fall of Saigon in 1975, large numbers of people began to
leave Vietnam by boat. Many arrived in Hong Kong, the numbers reaching a peak in 1979. At our instigation a conference was held in Geneva in that year at which the international community agreed
that all those leaving Vietnam should be treated as refugees and
resettled in the West. But from the early 1980s the exodus changed
in nature and it became clear that the great majority of those arriving in Hong Kong were economic migrants farmers, fisherman
and peasants from the North. They had no association with the
former South Vietnamese regime and therefore in many cases did not
fulfill the criteria for acceptance for resettlement laid down by many western countries, including the United States, who had
accepted the greatest number of the early boat people. It became
necessary to distinguish between those who were genuinely fleeing
persecution, and those who had left Vietnam for no reason other than
to seek a better life. Failure to draw the distinction would run
the risk of compromising the resettlement opportunities of the true
refugees.
In June 1988 the Hong Kong Government therefore introduced a
HARABD