TNAG-0802-FCO40-1006-Immigration-from-China-to-Hong-Kong-1978 — Page 180

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Mr Murray PS/Lord

opwy Roberts 1.1578

HONG KONG ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

HKK 341/1

No Tas Chr

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1. Mr Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International, wrote to the Secretary of State on 20 July expressing his concern about a newspaper story that a 72 year old Hong Kong resident had been jailed for giving food and shelter to illegal immigrants from China. Lord Goronwy-Roberts sent Mr Ennals an interim reply, on Dr Owen's behalf, on 1 August.

2. We have now received an account of the incident from the

Assistant Political Adviser in Hong Kong. He confirms that the original newspaper report was broadly correct: Mr Yau Ying-fu, a resident of the New Territories, was indeed sentenced to 6 months imprisonment as a result of an incident involving four illegal immigrants from China. But the report was misleading in implying that Mr Yau's crime was to have given food and shelter to the immigrants. He was in fact convicted for aiding and abetting them to break the Hong Kong law prohibiting anybody from entering the country without going through the prescribed immigration procedures. The article also omitted to mention that Mr Yau served only 12 days of his sentence before it was reviewed, as a result of local publicity, and reduced to a 6 month suspended sentence. Even the police who prosecuted Mr Yau believed that the original sentence was unduly harsh for a man of Mr Yau's age. All this happened well before the date on which the article was pub- lished in "Le Monde".

3. I recommend that Lord Goronwy-Roberts should write to Mr Ennals on the lines of the attached draft, which, while explaining the full facts of the case, also seeks to put it in the context of Hong Kong's acute population problem, of which immigration is an important aspect.

24 August 1978

R JT McLaren

Hong Kong and General Dept

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