Detention of Vietnam boat people 'necessary'
HONG KONG officials feared ''serious social unrest'' if the Vietnamese boat people arriving in droves in the late 1980s had been allowed to live and work freely.
A recent British submission to the United Nations, justifying the territory's detention policy, says Hong Kong people would never have stood by and allowed the Vietnamese to take jobs while illegal immigrants from China were being sent back or prosecuted.
The submission argues that the policy of holding all arrivals in detention, in place since 1982, is a necessary deterrent to spare the territory from further crises caused by influxes of Vietnamese asylum-seekers.
The British Government has sent the dossier to the UN in reply to a move by the United States-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights to have Geneva declare that Hong Kong's detention policy violates international refugee conventions.
It states: ''Against the background of illegal immigration from China, the Hong Kong Government would find it impossible publicly to defend a policy which left Vietnamese migrants at liberty and allowed to take up employment while illegal immigrants fromChina are immediately repatriated.
''Such a disparity of treatment between the Vietnamese and Chinese, both of whom have entered Hong Kong illegally, would be unacceptable to the local community.'' Quoting what it calls ''local resentment'' against the Vietnamese boat people, the UK submission says: ''To have allowed the influx of those from Vietnam to live and work in Hong Kong in these circumstances would have caused serious social unrest and a breakdown of public order.'' It adds: ''No territory in the modern world will adopt an unrestricted policy allowing aliens a right to migrate and settle there to improve their economic position . . . to detain in such circumstances does not breach human rights and is not arbitrary. It is necessary to protect the territory and its lawful citizens.'' Hong Kong first introduced the closed camps policy in 1982 in response to the first influx from Vietnam.