TNAG-2067-FCO40-2945-Vietnamese-boat-people-unaccompanied-minors-in-Hong-Kong-1990 — Page 37

на

Mr Howell worch

Thank. Die af

STANDARD LETTER/PARAGRAPHS

ORPHANS AND UNACCOMPANIED MINORS

Thank you for your letter of

My Hamilton SEAD

This is now the standard reply, approved by Mr Hauce. Grateful If you could transfor it to one of

discs and let us have ours

27/2

youur

Jack decelwolk HKD

+

about orphans/unaccompanied

children among the boat people in the camps in Hong Kong/about the possibility of adopting a Vietnamese child from the boat people camps in Hong Kong.

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.

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, fisherman 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.

In June 1988 the Hong Kong Government therefore introduced a

PEPAAI