CONFIDENTIAL
Ms Walker
wayxer
VIETNAMESE REFUGEES
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Mirto are & Mrskellen, fr int Opa 24311.
1. I have spoken on the telephone to Terry Byrne about paragraph 2 of the attached minute, and I think persuaded him that he is being a little hasty.
2. When we come to discuss this with other departments I think that we need to be very careful about the thesis that the UK cannot
in a way that might involve a breach of a UN Convention to which
it is a party, even if that Convention has not been extended to Hong Kong. assume that the legal position is that the Convention binds neither the Hong Kong Government nor the UK Government in respect of acts carried out by the Hong Kong Government or in respect of Hong Kong. If I understand it correctly, the original reasons for not extending the 1951 and 1967 Conventions to Hong Kong were that it
was thought that the provisions of the Conventions were not workable
in Hong Kong's special circumstances. If that is so it is surely a
to suggest that we have to make the Convention work in Hong Kong because of a "moral" obligation under the Conventions. I should also have thought that it tended to undermine our legal position.
3. In point of fact, I think it is difficult to construct an
argument as to why it is right to repatriate economic migrants from
China at a rate of about 50 a day, but wrong to repatriate economic migrants from Vietnam.
4. Even if we were bound by the Convention, to suggest that we
Vietnamme cannot approach the Chinese to discuss the matter seems to lead to a
circularity. As I understand it, any breach of the Convention would depend on there being reasonable grounds to suppose that refugees, if returned to Vietnam, would face harsh treatment. We cannot begin
assess what kind of treatment they would face without asking the
Vietnamese authorities.
CONFIDENTIAL.
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