JAPAN Tokyo publishes refugee guidelines for the first time, but not to welcome more

The Immigration Services Agency published a manual that explains the (very narrow) criteria to recognize this condition. In 2021, Japan accepted 74 people out of more than 2,000 applications, a record for the country. Amnesty International denounces the indefinite detention of asylum seekers.

Tokyo ( / Agencies) – Japan, criticized for its low reception rate for refugees and foreigners, has presented national guidelines for the granting of refugee status for the first time. The Immigration Services Agency has today published a manual which, however, as Justice Minister Ken Saito explained, “does not broaden the scope of the conditions for recognition” and is not intended to “increase the number of people to whom refugee status is granted. The publication of the guidelines, he specified, has as its main objective to better organize the granting of requests. “It is possible that there will be an increase in the number of quick grants of refugee status,” added the minister.

The Japanese Refugee Lawyers Network, for its part, questioned the effectiveness of the new manual: “There are no guarantees that the number of international protection recognitions will increase,” as the agency only compiled the document to help “better understand “the national system for this type of concessions, commented the organization.

In 2021, Japan only granted refugee status to 74 people out of 2,413 applications that were submitted; a record for the country, but a figure well below the number of refugees accepted by many other countries in the world. That same year, 580 people were allowed to remain on Japanese soil, 498 of them from Burma, where there is an ongoing civil conflict. Applications fell 88% compared to 2017, when 20,000 were submitted. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Japan has taken in 2,035 people recognized as “displaced”.

“Migrants have presented a bleak picture of what it means to apply for refugee status in Japan,” said Hideaki Nakagawa, director of Amnesty International Japan, on the occasion of the publication of new research. “Far from receiving help in their time of need, they speak of being subjected to endless, arbitrary detention in jail-like immigration centers.” Japanese law allows authorities to indefinitely detain irregular migrants, including asylum seekers, in violation of international law.

Japan is a signatory to the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which defines a refugee as one who cannot return to his or her country of origin due to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of certain social group or political opinions.

The guidelines presented today by the Government also mention persecution based on sexual orientation, consider the causes that can lead people to leave their country of origin and emphasize that the risk of persecution must be “real” and not abstract.