From The Minister of State
HKK 341/1
R2Carver
INREX
1 1 SEP 1978
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Dar. B
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London SW1A 2AH
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August 1978
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In his letter of 1 August, Lord Goronwy-Roberts promised to send a substantive reply to your letter of 20 July about an incident concerning illegal immigration into Hong Kong.
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We have now received a full report on the incident involving Mr Yau from the Hong Kong Government. The story as reported in "Le Monde" was broadly correct so far as it went. But it omitted one very important fact which should have been known to the paper's correspondent: Mr Yau's sentence was subsequently reviewed and reduced to a suspended sentence. In the event, he spent only 12 days in jail. article also gave a misleading impression of the charge on which Mr Yau was tried and convicted. His offence was not that he gave food and shelter to the four illegal immigrants but rather that he helped them to break the law of Hong Kong which (as in virtually every country in the world) prohibits immigrants from entering without going through the prescribed immigration procedures.
This case should be seen in the context of Hong Kong's acute population problem. Since the end of the war, the territory's population has increased more than sevenfold, from 600,000 to about 42 million. It is now one of the most densely populated places in the world, and the Hong Kong Government face an enormous task in trying to provide adequate social services for all their citizens. The task is already complicated by the steady influx of immigrants from China some 41,000 have arrived legally in the past year - and the Government are obliged to take what measures they can to prevent people entering Hong Kong illegally. The laws against aiding and abetting illegal immigrants are widely publicised and there can be no doubt that Mr Yau was well aware that he was breaking the law in not informing the police about the four who arrived at his home.
M Ennals Esq
Amnesty International 10 Southampton Street LONDON WC2
Jed
Ted Rowlands
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