hankyoreh

Celebrities Angelina Jolie and Jung Woo-sung

Reviews finished on Dec. 14 for 484 Yemeni refugee applicants who have arrived on Jeju Island since December of last year. For the first time, two of them were recognized as refugees, both of them journalists threatened with kidnapping and murder at home in connection with their reporting. Another 412 were granted permits for one-year humanitarian sojourns. Fifty-six of the applicants who denied, which means they will have to leave South Korea if their appeals are not accepted.

It is laudable that some minimal humanitarian action was granted with 87.7% of the applicants being allowed to stay for now (not including 14 who have left South Korea). But in a chairperson’s statement the same day, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea expressed concern about the fates of the 56 applicants denied refugee status and took issue with the fact that only two applicants had been granted refugee status. Indeed, the Ministry of Justice and other relevant authorities should be considering things in a more progressive way.

In an Apr. 2015 announcement of its position on Yemeni repatriation, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees recommended that countries grant access to civilians who have fled Yemen and stop forcibly repatriating them. The Jeju Office of Immigration stated that except for the two journalists, the other asylum seekers who arrived to escape conditions of civil war and forced conscription could not be viewed as refugees because they did not fall into the five main categories of persecution (including ethnic, religious, and political). From the UN’s perspective, this appears like all too narrow a reading.

Koreans have also experienced the hardships of the refugee experience during colonial occupation and the Korean War. The Republic of Korea today is a multicultural society where many ethnicities live side by side. Rather than let our actions be dictated by the ethnic and religious prejudices of a small subset of our population, we need to honor international human rights standards and approach these asylum seekers in a more open way.

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]