Just SayingGrim prospects for Hong Kong’s South Asian asylum seekers when their own governments want them in a gulag
Yonden Lhatoo is alarmed by Nepal’s top diplomat in the city backing calls for a detention centre for torture and asylum claimants, even suggesting harsh treatment to warn them off
I noticed that a rather disturbing piece of news last week barely caused a flutter in this town, but I can’t seem to let it go. Not yet.
Nepal’s top diplomat in Hong Kong, Baliram Prasad Dhami, held a joint press conference with pro-establishment legislator Priscilla Leung Mei-fun, to publicly back an unofficial campaign gaining traction to build some sort of an offshore detention centre – or concentration camp, if you want to call a spade a spade – for Indian, Pakistani and other South Asian asylum seekers “flocking” here.
For those who came in late, this foul solution to a genuine problem Hong Kong needs to fix has recently been bandied about by such august patrons as former security minister turned lawmaker Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee. Ip, who is also a member of Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying’s cabinet, has suggested finding an outlying island off neighbouring Shenzhen to detain all asylum and torture claimants seeking to enter Hong Kong.
She claims the idea resonates among her hardline buddies in high places and cites Hong Kong’s incarceration of Vietnamese boatpeople in the past as a justifiable historical precedent for introducing a “good deterrent”.