They could not be repatriated, out of fears that the Chinese government, which is suppressing a separatist movement among Uighurs in the Xinjiang region, would abuse them.
Some Fijian ultra-nationalists have even suggested that all Indians be "repatriated" out of Fiji, an idea that is met with anger and disbelief among Indians, many of whom were born here and have never left Fiji.
After a late-night drinking session which ended in a local Transfield employee allegedly being drugged and raped by three Australian Wilson Security guards, the guards were swiftly repatriated off the island, and out of reach of PNG law.
So far no records have been found of the complex, but thousands of soldiers were trained, shipped out, and repatriated to Gosport throughout the war.
Pakistani, Bangladeshi and North Africans - considered to be "economic migrants" - can also be sorted out and repatriated swiftly.
She and her sister Dolours fought a bitter campaign to be repatriated back to Ireland to serve out their sentence.
A Foreign Office source said yesterday that, if concerns remained over Brown's cause of death once his body had been repatriated, a UK pathologist could carry out a second post mortem examination.
"They [the MoD] were probably aware that some trainees were not adhering to discipline from an early stage and I wonder why [they had] not at a much earlier stage recognised that and taken a proportion of the trainees out and repatriated them much earlier".
As of 20 January, more than 41,700 persons had been repatriated – more than eight out of ten of them women and children.
She also promised to repatriate all 428 out-of-state prisoners, then housed in Virginia under contract.
They are, understandably, incensed that Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, was repatriated in November, to serve out the last month of the meager sentence he received after a trial by Military Commission last summer, while they, who have never been charged with anything, remain imprisoned with no way of knowing if they will ever be released.
