voluntary repatriation scheme; the publicity effort in Vietnam; and the mandatory repatriation flight last December have all given potential boat people an unambiguous message the days of automatic resettlement through Hong Kong are over.
ET
I believe that Hong Kong needs to aim higher. It needs to aim to achieve a climate of opinion in the camps and in the territory which is conducive to dealing with the actual problems faced. Let me be specific.
The following thoughts are based on an extrapolation from one case, which concerns me greatly, and a hunch; they are not yet based on sufficient evidence, but I believe nonetheless they have truth in them, and I have spoken to quite a few people in Hong Kong who corroborate them in part.
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
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 within existing budgets.
and
Unless the Vietnamese people in Hong Kong know that there is general and justifiable confidence in the screening process, 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. I genuinely fear that we may.
If (b) makes sense, 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 truly as fair as it can be and will be made. Secondly, the procedures must be seen by the international community to be coherent. As I have said, however, the factual basis for neither seem to me yet to be in place. I deal with status determination in detail below. Only if both these propositions are based on accurate reflections of fact will repatriation schemes stand a better chance of being signed up for.
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 (1) wrong in principle to return them,