Well, this has to be terribly embarrassing (HT to Lost Nomad).
BTW, would someone explain to me why Canada is accepting refugee claims from South Koreans (assuming for a moment that they aren’t North Koreans, who are legally citizens of the Republic of Korea)?
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Well, Canada is known to give refugee status to people who are emigrating for any kind of social pressures. A handicapped or mixed-blood Korean could thus apply, I think.
Transgender South Koreans seek asylum in Canada to escape military service.
I hope the judge was wearing his “I’m Canadian” tee-shirt!
I’m not sure why there are South Korean ‘refugee’ claimaints still (maybe bad advice?), when their chances of being allowed to stay are practically nil.. All this does is buy time for the claimant.
Here’s the story from a Canadian newspaper.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/.....9912238834
Her Canadian boyfriend (ex-English teacher in Korea?) tipped off the authorities.
Well, cm’s post answers questions I had has to how they knew the judge was looking for a ‘bribe’.
Claiming refugee status, as cm pointed out, is a common practice to buy time for applicants who have been denied immigration by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). Refugee claims are handled by IRB (Immigration and Refugee Board), which is independent of CIC. The full process usually takes months, even years. In the mean time, the applicants are free to remain in Canada, work, and even collect government assistance.
I take it that she and her boyfriend are planning to get married, in which case she would become first a permanent resident, and then a citizen.
Domestic violence as a grounds for asylum? Sounds like an abuse of the system to me.
slim, of course it’s an abuse of the system.
Think about this, there are refugee claimants in Canada, who are from such human rights violating countries like Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, and Ireland.
Yes, it’s unfortunate. But, there will always be abuses, no matter what the government does. What counts is that those who are in real need of refuge get it.
Because Canada recognizes domestic violence as grounds for granting asylum and could have some generally lax standards for other considerations (such as the need for the government of the home country to be unable or unwilling to help, if not directly committing the persecution)? It does seem a bit strange, but absent a reading of any specific cases, I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable. Of course, maybe the judges in the other cases that got through the system got their own form of quid pro quo, so to speak…
Acceptance rates for South Korean refugee claimants are low — about 11 per cent compared with an overall 40 per cent of the 20,000 annual claims.
Kim, 25, came to Canada in 2004, claiming she’d been a victim of domestic violence, the grounds most commonly used by South Koreans, said Soh Young Jeong, a reporter with the Korea Times, a Toronto-based community paper.
Wow. Will they let me back in as a refugee? Can I go on Welfare?
What domestic violence can a 23 year old single Korean woman claim that she can’t get away from except by fleeing the country?
Honestly, I know Korean girls who personally abhor Korean males simply because of the physical violence aspect in a relationship… or forcing sex on their girlfriends because they were ‘overwhelmed by their love for them’. A lot of girlfriends who break up with these ‘boyfriends’ are sometimes hounded by them for years… even bringing in their mothers to harangue their ex-girlfriends. So you can imagine, the general size of Korea not withstanding, sometimes it’s just easier to pick up and leave the country and everything behind to get away from an ex. Ex-boyfriends are bad, ex-husbands can be worse.
Hmm…I still don’t buy it, not least because abusive stalkers are everywhere. My guess is this story is bandied about on internet sites and message boards etc as the average middle-class S.Koreans’ best or perhaps only chance at Canadian asylum. If an abusive ex-boyfriend were grounds for seeking asylum elsewhere, there would be no end to the claims.
A Canadian should try claiming refugee status in Korea.
There are a gazillion reasons I could think of……
rapoki, yes…mainly the evil taxes.