hankyoreh

By Um Ji-won, staff reporter
Just two years ago, “Hamid,” 26, knew little about South Korea as a country. He certainly never imagined he would end up on a hunger strike in one of its prisons for foreign nationals.
In May 2011, he fled his homeland of Iran. He was fed up with the country’s strict Islamic laws. He was tired of reading the Koran every day. It was four years ago when he discovered a new religion. The son of a pious Muslim family in Tehran, he was introduced by a friend to a Protestant Christian church in 2009.
After learning about the conversion, his fundamentalist father visited him at work every day to demand that he return to Islam. Hamid knew that under a strict interpretation of Islam, apostates may be killed. One day, he was visited by police. He no longer heard anything from the friend who introduced him to Christianity.
He had left Iran in search of religious freedom. His journey took him to South Korea, where he planned to stay before moving on to Canada, the “refugee’s paradise”. But the broker who arranged for his departure stopped contacting him once he arrived in Korea. His life as an illegal alien wore on. Back in January, he heard that his 28-year-old brother “Hassan” had been jailed in Iran because of church service videos and photographs Hamid had sent him. The Islamic Revolutionary Court issued a summons on charges of apostasy and “blaspheming against the holy prophet.” Having his refugee status recognized in South Korea suddenly became more important than leaving for Canada.
On Mar. 13, Hamid visited a Seoul immigration office to personally submit his refugee status application. He met all the criteria, being faced with political and religious persecution. But the South Korean government turned him down. In fact, it issued a deportation order the following day and had him incarcerated at the Hwaseong foreigners’ detention center in Suwon, Gyeonggi province. The reason is that he was accused of being an illegal alien who entered the country on a forged passport.
The Ministry of Justice’s response went against its own guidelines for handling refugee status claims. According to those guidelines, those who commit document fraud to gain refugee status are supposed to be allowed to complete the procedures while in custody, but exceptions are also granted when the individual voluntarily admits the forgery and the authenticity of the application is acknowledged. On his documents for the immigration office, Hamid clearly stated that he had used a forged passport.
“A lot of refugees would never be able to leave their country without forged documents,” said Kim Jong-cheol, an attorney with Advocates for Public Interest Law (APIL), a group working to protect refugee rights.
“To detain refugees who openly admit to using forged papers not only violates of the Ministry of Justice procedural guidelines, but also goes against Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which states that applicants should not be punished for entering the country illegally,” Kim added.
Calling Hamid‘s treatment a “patent violation of refugee rights,” Kim fretted that the jailing of refugees for entering the country with forged papers could scare others away from applying.
According to Kim, Hamid was one week into a hunger strike as of Mar. 24, having started on March 17. APIL lodged an objection with the Minister of Justice on March 21 and submitted emergency petitions to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion.
A source at the Ministry of Justice said the organization plans to “take rational action” on the issue.
　
Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]