TNAG-2067-FCO40-2945-Vietnamese-boat-people-unaccompanied-minors-in-Hong-Kong-1990 — Page 19

From The Minister of State

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

London SW1A 2AH

ред

13 March 1990

18

داهمه مطالب

Dan Am Murray,

HKB

RECEIVED IN S:

243115

0 3 APR 1990

į

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Thank you for your letter of 13 December 1989 about unaccompanied children among the Vietnamese boat people_in_ Hong Kong. I am sorry to have taken so long to reply.

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The unaccompanied children among the boat people form a group requiring special attention and care. At the International Conference on Indo-Chinese Refugees, held in Geneva in June of last year, procedures were agreed which laid down guidelines for the examination of each child's claim to asylum and directed that decisions about their future should be taken on the basis of the individual child's own best interests. Before I go into the detail of this, it might be helpful if I explain some of the background to the current situation in Hong Kong and in the region.

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After the fall of Saigon in 1975, large numbers of people began to leave Vietnam by boat. Many arrived in Hong Kong, the numbers reaching a peak in 1979. At our instigation a conference was held in Geneva in that year at which the international community agreed that all those leaving Vietnam should be treated as refugees and resettled in the West. But from the early 1980s the exodus changed in nature and it became clear that the great majority of those arriving in Hong Kong were economic migrants farmers, fishermen and peasants from the north. They had no association with the former South Vietnamese regime and therefore in many cases did not fulfill the criteria for acceptance for resettlement laid down by many Western countries, including the United States, who had accepted the greatest number of the early boat people. It became necessary to distinguish between those who were genuinely fleeing persecution and those who had left Vietnam for no reason other than to seek a better life. Failure to draw the distinction would run the risk of compromising the resettlement opportunities of the true refugees.

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In June 1988 the Hong Kong Government therefore introduced a screening procedure, approved and monitored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The second Geneva International Conference, held in June of 1989, agreed on a Comprehensive Plan of Action, under which screening, based on the Hong Kong model and with the full involvement of the UNHCR, would be introduced throughout the South East Asian