Read the full judgment text of on BabelCite. was delivered on 13 December 1990.
1. Ever since 1975 a number of people commonly known as the Vietnamese boat people have left Vietnam in search of asylum and resettlement elsewhere. In the beginning those arriving in Hong Kong were automatically treated as refugees and held here pending resettlement elsewhere. However in more recent years the pattern of resettlement has failed to match the pattern of arrival, so much so that by 1988 there had accumulated a vast backlog of boat people held here with little or no prospect of immi