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Koita Boh Saran is a 26-year-old Guinean woman who was forced to marry at the young age of 15. To escape abusive treatment by her family, she decided to move to South Korea in 2016, when she was 20 years old.

Entering the country as a student, she applied for refugee status, but was denied. The conclusion was that because she was now an adult, there was less likelihood that she would be forced to marry by her family if she returned to Guinea.

Saran resubmitted her application, to no avail. Staying in South Korea on a G-1 “miscellaneous” visa, she is required to visit her immigration office every six months to confirm that she will be allowed to extend her stay. She is not entitled to the cost of living support and employment permissions granted to people who have submitted their first refugee application.

While in South Korea, Saran met another foreign national and had a child with him. She now has a life here.

“I can’t go back now,” she said. “The forced marriage thing is still an issue, but my parents would have an even bigger issue now that I have children.”

“Last Lunar New Year, my second child was very sick, but I was told that hospitalization would cost 2 million won (US$1,500) because we didn’t have health insurance,” she recalled.

“We had no choice but to leave the hospital. I couldn’t stop crying because I was worried about my child,” she said.

For World Refugee Day on Monday, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) issued a recommendation calling for improvements to Ministry of Justice (MOJ) measures that have placed restrictions on those staying in South Korea after reapplying for refugee status.

In its message to the Minister of Justice, the NHRCK called for “allowing the issuance of documents to prove refugee re-applicant status and developing procedures for support or employment permissions to guarantee minimum survival for those whose review period is inevitably drawn out.”

Currently, the MOJ’s guidelines for refugee applicant reviews and treatment define re-application by those denied the first time as a form of “application abuse,” while excluding re-applicants from sojourn permissions as a rule. They also extend a deferment of the departure deadline ranging from three to six months.

Re-applicants who are unable to extend their stays are no longer entitled to applications for cost of living support, permissible employment activities, or the use of immigration and international resident support centers.

“The current uniform restrictions applied to refugee status re-applicants originated in concerns about the unprecedentedly large number of refugee applications over the past few years and the resulting backlog in reviews,” the NHCRK noted.

“This could be criticized as a matter of skewed priorities,” it added.

“When there are cases of refugee re-applications that patently abuse the refugee application system, the decision on whether to grant refugee status should be based on expedited procedures, and it should stop penalizing re-applicants across the board in terms of sojourn conditions,” the commission suggested.

In his own statement the same day, NHRCK Chairperson Song Doo-hwan said, “In honor of World Refugee Day, the NHRCK urges the South Korean government to stop viewing refugee applications and re-applications as an ‘expedient’ for obtaining sojourn extensions and work instead to improve the related infrastructure, including more specialized review personnel, so that the refugee review process does not draw out into the long term.”

By Jang Ye-ji, staff reporter

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