From: http://www.nguoi-viet.com/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=12558&z=8

Editor’s note: Hội Trịnh, a Vietnamese-Australian lawyer who has worked pro-bono in Manila for the last seven years to help resettle the Vietnamese boat people, gave the keynote speech at the conference. Following is an excerpt:

Having worked in the Philippines for the 2000 stateless Vietnamese, I have learned that there are many more families that are still being split apart, husbands from wives, sons and daughters from their aging parents, brothers from sisters, for over 15 years. Their story is already well-documented. They left Vietnam by boat in 1989 not knowing that the international community headed by the United States had already made up its mind not to accept any more refugees from Vietnam. The tide simply turned against them.

They were then housed in refugee camps for eight years until 1997 when the camps were closed and the United Nations withdrew its support. After eight years of confinement and total dependence on the U.N., they were told to simply leave and fend for themselves.

Economically, they were left with absolutely nothing.

Socially, they are considered undocumented and undesirable foreigners without any status — they don’t have the right to work, to go to school, to own a house, to gain access to public facilities.

Legally, to this day, they remain stateless unrecognized and unprotected by any sovereign states, including the Philippines. In the words of the then-Philippine Immigration Commissioner, the stateless Vietnamese there “have not been granted permanent resident status, nor offered settlement in the country… The Philippines has never been, and is not, a resettlement country. It also has no intention of socially integrating persons whose applications for refugee status it denied in the first place”.

Given such a harsh reality, who would not do what I have done?

But for those refugee advocates in the 1970s and 1980s, my family and, I believe, many of us here wouldn’t be given the opportunities to rebuild our lives since our escape from Vietnam.

Perhaps for me, it’s simply “payback” time. My family and I were helped. I now am simply returning the favor...

I remember one morning, back in 1996, just before I called it quits at Baker & McKenzie’s Sydney office, where I was a junior corporate lawyer for the supposedly biggest law firm in the world. I was in a warehouse doing some litigation discovery work for one of our biggest clients, a bank that was fighting over some loan agreement with an investment firm. If we won, my law partner and I (one would hope) would get tons of praise and money. But I was utterly and impossibly bored... and could think of nothing but the good times I had in Hong Kong. While I was still in law school in the early 90s, I had the privilege to work with the late Pam Baker whose firm was alone in its fight for the rights of some 60,000 Vietnamese boat people, at the time detained in the infamous crowded detention centers.

Lawyers from all over the world were coming together to fight for Vietnamese refugees... We went all the way to the Privy Council in England (the equivalent of the Supreme Court in the U.S.) to secure freedom for some, and we watched in horror as masses of people were forcibly repatriated to Vietnam.

It was a time of many changes in Hong Kong, including its return to China in 1997, and I was excited to witness such historic moments. I didn’t know what I wanted exactly. But I knew what I didn’t want.

So with a ticket in hand and $800 dollars, I returned to Hong Kong and to Pam’s non-profit law firm, without a real job.

The rest as they say is… history. Eight years after leaving Sydney, I still haven’t found a real job.

But intentional or otherwise, what I have found is a role for myself... From a lawyer, I turned into a fundraiser, then an advocate. And now, a speaker at this event, where, without a real job, I am giving a speech to distinguished professionals most of whom, I suspect, have more than one real job...

Nothing beats the euphoric feeling when obstacles are overcome and when a group of friends get together to claim a victory for the people that they have been fighting for. When the U.S. announced last April that they will interview all the remaining 2000 stateless Vietnamese for resettlement in the U.S. this year, I was overjoyed. But more so, I remember feeling the same euphoric feeling celebrating our victory over dinner with our friends and supporters in Washington, D.C.

I would never trade that for anything.