Only two of the more than 480 Yemeni asylum seekers who arrived on a South Korean island this year after fleeing the catastrophic war in their home country have been granted refugee status, officials said on Friday.
The Yemenis arrived in Jeju, a tourist island off the southern coast of South Korea, in the first five months of this year, capitalizing on the island’s no-visa entry policy. As the sudden influx of asylum seekers spawned anti-migrant sentiment across South Korea, the central government changed its policy in June to require visas for citizens of Yemen.
On Friday, the Justice Ministry said that the government had completed screening applicants seeking for refugees status, granting the privilege to only two of them. Both were Yemeni journalists who faced the risk of persecution if they returned home, the ministry said. The government did not reveal their identities.
The government has allowed 412 Yemenis to remain in South Korea on temporary humanitarian visas on the condition that they leave once the situation in Yemen has stabilized.
Fifty-six Yemenis have been denied humanitarian visas but are entitled to challenge the decisions in court, the ministry said. Fourteen others have withdrawn their refugee applications or voluntarily left South Korea, the government said.
The humanitarian visas limit the Yemenis’ ability to work and bar them from many benefits open to recognized refugees, like health care and the opportunity to have family members join them.
South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission sharply criticized the Justice Ministry for failing to declare more Yemenis refugees.
On Friday, its chairwoman, Choi Young-ae, accused the ministry of screening the refugee applicants “in an indiscriminate manner to mitigate the public sentiments against them.
”Among the many South Koreans who take pride in their relatively homogeneous society, the sudden arrival of the asylum seekers set off a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, leading to what was has been considered South Korea’s first organized anti-asylum movement. During recent rallies, anti-immigrant activists vilified the Yemenis as potential Arab terrorists, rapists or illegal immigrants stealing jobs.
Of 40,400 non-Koreans who have applied for refugee status in the country since 1994, only about 840, or about 2 percent, have received it, according to government data. Most of the accepted applicants fled North Korea. The United Nations Refugee Agency has called on South Korea to welcome more displaced people from around the world.
SOURCE: New York Times
