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Definition of a refugee
According to the 1951 UN
Convention on Refugees, a refugee is someone who is outside the country of his nationality "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion" and is unable or, because of such fear, unwilling to seek his own country's protection. Although the Convention has not been extended to Hong Kong, all refugees arriving there from Vietnam have been granted refugee status under Hong Kong's own Immigration Ordinance, which was specially amended for this purpose. They have been accepted on the understanding reached at the 1979 Geneva conference that third countries should accept refugees reaching a "place of first asylum" - in this case Hong Kong. It was also generally agreed at the Geneva conference that boat people from Indochina should be considered as a group to be refugees, irrespective of individual motives for leaving. As the years have elapsed, and as boat departures from Vietnam have continued, this consensus has come under some strain. First asylum countries are increasingly aware of economic factors as a motivation for refugee departures from Indochina.
UNHCR solutions
The UNHCR has identified three durable solutions to the refugee problem:
Voluntary repatriation (where possible). So far, the following official repatriations have been registered: about 3,000 Cambodians from Laos and 2,300 Laotians from Thailand.
Integration of refugees in their country of first asylum or in other countries of the region. This has been possible only to a very limited extent in the case of Indochinese refugees, mainly because of the difficulties of absorbing refugees with different ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds to the population of the places of first asylum; and also in Hong Kong's case because of the already severe overcrowding in the territory. A further constraint on local integration is the understanding, arising from the 1979 conference, that first asylum countries should not be left with a residual case-load of refugees.
Resettlement. The United States is the first preference for the great majority. About 130,000 Vietnamese went there in 1975, and since then the United States has accepted a total of over 580,000 Indochinese.
Other countries have provided places as follows since 1975:
France
97,000
Canada
97,000
Australia
94,000
FRG Britain
23,000
19,000
Japan
4,000
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