S.17.
S.18.
S.19.
personnel. I know this is presumptuous, but I believe it may be true. Overall, I fear that unless there is an attempt to come to grips with the actual problems faced by asylum-seekers and by those working on refugee affairs, there will be graver problems arising in Hong Kong over the 6-1/2 years before the transfer of sovereignty. It may be that most people can agree on aims. Effective steps towards those aims do not yet appear to be satisfactorily in place. I should add that I have heard that the PRC has declared that by 1997 all asylum-seekers must have gone. I would like to understand their position better.
I fear that unless there is a change of procedural emphasis in the process of screening and review, the arrangements in place in Hong Kong cannot safely be relied upon to distinguish refugees from non-refugees in a sufficiently coherent manner. There may be as well a problem with the way in which the criteria have been understood and applied by staff working on status-determination; there may also be a problem with knowledge about how a communist system operates. I would like to examine whether these problems are curable without additional expense. Unless the Vietnamese people have confidence in the screening process, and unless the arrangements for returnees' resumption of life in Vietnam are adequately monitored and known to be safe, I believe that Hong Kong's repatriation schemes in the end will have to resort to methods which could severely damage the long-term interests of Hong Kong people, as well as Vietnamese returnees themselves. I would not want to see a British government get this wrong.
If the above is acceptable, it may be necessary to do again a job which many must have tried already. First, Vietnamese people need to be persuaded that the process of status determination is fair. Secondly, the procedures must be seen by the international community to be coherent. As I have said, the factual basis for neither seem to me yet to be in place. Only if both these propositions are accurate reflections of fact will repatriation schemes stand a better chance of being signed up for. I believe that both aims are achievable. Unless the screening process operates in such a way as to give genuine. confidence that only genuine non-refugees are being sent back, I believe that it is (a) wrong in principle to return them, and (b) very unlikely indeed that repatriation will be either numerically sufficient or satisfactorily humane in its results.
It is generally accepted as necessary for there to be some form of effective guarantee that people who are returned to Vietnam will not be subjected to treatment which would otherwise have made them refugees had it occurred prior to departure. The exact nature of this guarantee is difficult to define. Not having yet been to Vietnam, I am unable to say how the current guarantees are working. If I can get the funding, I will write a further paper on this specific issue and travel to Vietnam for the purpose. I understand that "more immediate and