TNAG-1800-FCO40-2560-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-refugees-principle-of-first-asylum-1988 — Page 98

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Department, made the suggestion that one way of handling those who

had several years to wait before being resettled would be to find

temporary (e.g. 3 to 4 years) migrant work for them in a third

country, e.q. in the Middle East.)

Highlights

4.

The following more detailed points are worth recording:-

a) Hong Kong. Rita Fan and Hui Yin Fat both made verv

effective contributions which plaved a part in achieving the

realistic conclusions on screening. Rita Fan gave an important

speech in plenary in which, with great effect, she allowed the

figures of increasing arrivals and decreasing departures to speak

for themselves. Both she and Hui made it clear on several occasions

that LeqCo had rejected push-backs but favoured screening as the

most humane solution to a problem which was of others' making.

It is worth noting the presence at the conference of a rather

nushy lady called Tuyet-Nguyet. She is a Vietnamese living in

Hong Kong, apparently a journalist and a leading light in the

refugee movement, though neither Rita Fan nor Hui had heard of her.

She argued that the closed camps in Hong Kong should be opened so

that those in them could seek work and was concerned that Hong Kong

might introduce a policy of treating all new arrivals as illegal

immigrants.

b) UNHCR. There were two UNHCR speakers, Sascha Casella,

adviser at the High Commissioner's office in Geneva and

Susan Timberlake, described as protection officer from the UNHCR

office in Washington. They were both prone to agonising about the

difficulties of finding humane solutions to the problems faced by

countries of first asylum. Casella said that there was no single

solution to the problem and declined to offer any definitive

answers. He thought that there was no such thing as humane

deterrence, though he accepted the principle of screening and argued

at one point that not screening when faced with arrivals such as

teenage illiterate fishermen from North Vietnam itself eroded the

principle of first asylum. Susan Timberlake amonised over the

difficulty of defining a refugee. An element was lack of choice in