4.
On the other hand, if we are to press for UNHCR sponsored meetings with a narrower focus and attendance, do we not risk running foul of the Honolulu Group which maintains its own contacts with the High Commissioner? It would help us to know more of your thinking on this whole issue.
5. In any case we hope that this Mission will be the channel through which you will approach the High Commissioner. I think it would be better to act here in Geneva rather than through the UNHCR representative in London. The Ambassador has, as you know, recently become Chairman of the (Western) Humanitarian Liaison Working Group (HLWG) which covers refugee and other humanitarian issues.
He will therefore be in regular contact with Hocké, but will need to know exactly what line to pursue on Vietnamese refugees.
6. Incidentally, we notice that you mention in your letter Hocké's eagerness "to wrest the Danish proposals on the global refugee problem from the Third Committee". I am not sure whether you meant to imply that there was something wrong with Hocké acting in this way. In fact our understanding is that the Danes only raised their proposal in the Third Committee for purely domestic political reasons. Their Permanent Representative here acknowledged privately that the matter ought to have been raised in Geneva, but, for obvious reasons, he has not said so publicly!
7.
Our impression is that most members of HLWG consider that it would be far more appropriate to pursue these Danish ideas (if they are to be pursued) in the Executive Committee of UNHCR rather than in New York. Indeed the Danish ideas have already been aired in Geneva at the informal consultations on asylum-seekers in Europe on 8/9 December where the consensus was that such initiatives should be discussed within the UNHCR framework and not in the General Assembly. The Danes now seem tacitly to have accepted this and have asked for a meeting of HLWG on 10 February at which to carry forward discussion of their proposals.
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