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| Asylum seekers participate in a rally organized by Amnesty and NANCEN in front of Bosingak bell pavilion in central Seoul, last September, calling for better treatment and review processes. / Korea Times file |
By Lee Suh-yoon
More than 20,000 asylum seekers are waiting to hear back from the Korean Immigration Office, according to recent government data made public Sunday.
The backlog is apparently due to chronic understaffing at the office resulting in insufficient officials to review the applications.
Refugee rights group NANCEN and the immigration office said 21,341 refugees were waiting for the results of their asylum application at the end of April.
Starting this year, the justice ministry doubled the number of staff to more effectively handle asylum applications but the workload is still far from realistic, with around 260 applications being assigned to each officer.
Between January and April this year, 4,095 persons filed for asylum here, but immigration officers were only able to review just 1,238 applications during the same period. Thousands more are expected to submit their case for review by the end of the year.
"A person's life is at stake in these refugee applications, but the limited number of immigration officers makes it difficult for them to be reviewed properly," Kim Yeon-ju, a NANCEN member, told The Korea Times.
According to individual cases NANCEN keeps tabs on, each refugee is on average given a three-to-five-hour interview with the immigration officer throughout the entire process. Any paperwork submitted without a Korean translation is simply not counted as evidence by immigration authorities, Kim added.
There are 68.5 million people who are forcibly displaced and 3.1 million asylum seekers worldwide, according to a United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees' report last year.
Despite this being a small figure compared to those of European nations, more asylum seekers are starting to arrive in Korea. Last year, 16,173 applied for asylum here, a 6,000-person jump from the previous year.
The sudden influx created a bigger bottleneck. Data shows it took asylum seekers an average of 10.6 months to get through the first of two review processes last year.
Even after this, most were rejected. Out of the 3,879 applicants reviewed last year, only 144, or 3.7 percent, were given refugee status. The acceptance rate for asylum seekers since 1994, when the country first started accepting refugees, is 3.9 percent, well below the global average of 30 percent.
The low figure is not entirely separate from the public's hostile response to the recent influx. News of 561 Yemeni refugees landing on Jeju Island last year spurred months of protests that were fueled by Islamophobia and worries of job-taking by the newcomers. In the end, the justice ministry granted refugee status to only two applicants; 412 were given renewable humanitarian visas, which allows asylum seekers to work but does not guarantee the same social welfare services granted to refugees.
A total of 954 asylum seekers have been granted refugee status here since 1994. About a third are from Myanmar, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people have been displaced since 2017. Asylum seekers from Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Pakistan make up another third of this small group of recognized refugees.
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