Vietnamese boat people in 1982. Some rights reserved.These two texts, which seem still to speak to our concerns in the year 2015, did not have a high profile during Foucault's lifetime. The 1979 Japanese press interview about refugees was not translated into French until 1994, or into English until very recently. The interview may have been a delayed result of Foucault's busy visit to Japan in spring 1978, when he gave several talks and interviews, and visited a Zen monastery. The Boat People do not seem to have been discussed on record during that visit. Daniel Defert records that the Japanese weekly paper's series was on 'very important people of the world'.
Foucault would have wanted this term to refer to the refugees, not himself. The 1981 Geneva text, though written to be read out at a press conference, seems to have been unpublished, and apparently not even typed, before the week after Foucault's death. The Libération editors' comments, when they published the piece in a tribute issue of the paper after Foucault's death, seem a little fanciful. There is no confirming evidence that it was intended as an outline of a new charter of human rights, or that it was widely circulated to garner reactions and support. Yet it seems increasingly appropriate to consider it as perhaps Foucault's most important single public statement.
In June 1979, Foucault, together with Bernard Kouchner and André Glucksmann, organized a press conference at the Collège de France, attended by both Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron (thus offering an unprecedented spectacle of ideologically opposed literati shelving their differences in humanitarian engagement), to call for the acceptance of boat-people refugees in European countries, especially France. This was indeed followed by an agreement of the French government to accept all refugees saved from the sea by a rescue ship which Kouchner was involved in organizing. (This incidentally was the period when Foucault is nowadays often said to have withdrawn from public engagements because of harsh criticisms he had received for his newspaper reports on Iran. André Glucksmann had written in January 1979 a series of reports from South East Asia on the boat people in the Italian paper Corriera della Sera, as part of the same series of investigations, directed by Foucault, which included Foucault's Iran reports.)
