The recent court ruling that granted refugee status to a Congolese dissident should serve as an occasion for the nation to review its system for accommodating people who have been displaced because of persecution in their home countries.
The ruling by a Seoul court overrode a previous decision by immigration authorities that denied asylum for the 34-year-old man from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Immigration officials rejected the man’s application for asylum because his accounts of what he went through in his country were “inconsistent.”
The court thought otherwise. It would be difficult, the court said, for the man to present all that happened in detail and with proper documentation. Moreover, the court opined that he would have not come to the immigration office if he had entered Korea in order to get a job as the officials had suspected.
Court papers showed that the man, a mid-level member of the opposition in the African country, had been arrested three times. He was tortured and eventually sentenced to a 17-year prison term, from which he escaped by bribing prison guards.
There is no doubt that immigration authorities must be capable of identifying people who suffered from persecution because of their race, religion or political beliefs from illegal immigrants.
In fact, many asylum seekers hail from countries that are sources of illegal immigrants. But this should not exempt immigration authorities from the responsibility of protecting people who are in real need.
It is apparent that the government is not properly dealing with the steady growth in the number of asylum seekers. Data released recently showed that 2,176 people applied for asylum in the first 10 months of this year, compared with 423 in the entire year of 2010, 1,011 in 2011, 1,143 in 2012 and 1,574 last year.
Of them, 61 were granted refugee status. This rate is about one-third of the international average. What’s good, however, is that the government is trying to accommodate more, in the less strict form of granting “residential rights on humanitarian grounds.” This year, 491 benefited from this, compared with just six last year.
One more problem regarding refugees is the shortage of manpower in relevant offices. This forces asylum seekers to wait for almost a year to get their cases reviewed. As a matter of fact, the Congolese man arrived here in early 2012 and it took close to three years for him to be granted asylum.
As the Congolese man’s attorney pointed out, many asylum seekers are held in substandard facilities ― he actually called them “quasi-prisons.” This is shameful for a nation which joined the U.N. convention on refugees as early as 1992 and which last year became the first Asian country to have an independent law on refugees.
