By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter
From June, asylum seekers will be able to land jobs here, even during the time their application is being screened, the government said Thursday. They had previously been completely banned from being hired since 1992 when the government signed into the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
The Ministry of Justice said a bill allowing employment of asylum seekers with ``presumably proper reasons'' was recently approved by the National Assembly and it will take effect from June.
Under the revised law, if the immigration office fails to decide whether or not to grant refugee status to an applicant who has ``presumably reasonable reasons'' after a certain period of time due to further investigations being required, the applicant will be given permission to work.
Once obtained, the work permission will not be removed until all administrative and legal procedures to determine their legitimacy are finished, which usually takes more than one year after application.
An immigration official told The Korea Times, ``We plan to allow them to work after a (certain) period of between six months and one year.''
The revision came amid growing complaints from asylum seekers ㅡ whose cases have been pending for some time ㅡ and their supporters in civic groups.
They have claimed that the work restriction has driven almost all asylum seekers here into extreme financial hardship and made them rely heavily on outside support for survival. In particular, most unsupported applicants have illegally worked at factories to make a living. Due to their status, they have frequently fallen victim to assault or exploitation, they claimed.
``It usually takes several years for a petition to be finalized at the immigration office or court,'' a lawyer said.
According to a recent survey of 300 refugee applicants by the National Human Rights Commission, 24 percent of them spent more than one year waiting for their first interview. Nearly 30 percent of them responded that it took more than one year for them to learn of the interview result and 7 percent said it took five years.
The immigration office plans to streamline the administrative process and enhance its manpower to cope with the growing number of refugee applications.
For the first ten months of the year, nearly 2,100 foreigners sought refugee status, the ministry said.