Korea remains harsh country for asylum seekers

Members of civic groups supporting refugees hold a rally in central Seoul, May 4, calling on the new government to come up with better measures for asylum seekers. Newsis

Refugee acceptance rate stands at 1 percent

By Lee Hyo-jin

Koita Boh Saran, a 26-year-old woman from Guinea, West Africa, was just 17 years old when she was forced to marry a 45-year-old man, becoming his fourth wife in the process. She is among the many underage girls who are coerced into early marriages in the country where child marriage is quite a common phenomenon.

She had no choice but to marry the man as her family threatened to assault her if she refused. A few months into the unhappy marriage, Koita fled to Korea and applied for refugee status in December 2015.

"My friend's father told me that Korea is a safe country for women and that I would be able to begin a new life here," she told The Korea Times, speaking in fluent Korean.

However, entering Korea was just the beginning of her hardship. She was not aware that Korea is one of the strictest countries for asylum seekers.

Over the past six years, her application to gain refugee status has been rejected by the Ministry of Justice several times. With the help of a local civic group, Koita took her case to an appellate court last year and is currently awaiting the results anxiously.

"I have nowhere else to go. Going back to my home country is the last thing I would do. Some of my friends were killed after they refused to get married," she said, adding that she would rather stay as an undocumented resident in Korea.

However, her chances of being granted refugee status are very slim.

According to data from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), between 2010 and 2020, Korea's refugee acceptance rate was a mere 1.3 percent, the second-lowest among G20 countries.

Korea's figure is lower than that of its neighboring countries such as China and Russia, which stood at 15.5 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively.

Kim Yeon-joo, a lawyer at Nancen, a Seoul-based refugee support center, attributed the low acceptance rate to the government's lack of willingness to protect asylum seekers and the strong anti-refugee sentiment of Koreans.

"If you look at how they interview the asylum seekers, it seems like the officials focus on screening them out. In most cases, the applicants are deprived of opportunities to seek legal aid and are left on their own to prove the persecutions they would potentially face back in their home countries," she said.

"Korea has been proudly representing itself since 2013 as the first country in East Asia to enact the Refugee Act, but in reality, the system has been operated poorly throughout the past eight years."

Pointing out the absence of a humanitarian approach and standardized guidelines in the screening procedures, Kim urged the government to examine asylum seekers better based on objective data to measure the risk of persecution in each applicant's home country.

On the other hand, Kim Hyung-oh, head of Refugee Out, a civic group opposing the acceptance of refugees, believed that the 1 percent refugee acceptance rate is attributable to loopholes in the screening system.

"There are so many 'fake refugees' who are abusing the system, which shows that the government's refugee system is not working properly. It has failed," he said. "The government should find other ways to support the displaced population in the world, through fundraising, for instance."

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