Fumiyasu Akegawa, Chair & CEO DEVNET International/Japan
Japan’s House of Representatives has passed a bill to amend the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act to tighten the detention of foreign nationals. The bill is almost identical to an amendment that was scrapped in 2021. It shows no reflection on the death of a Sri Lankan woman at a Nagoya Immigration Bureau facility, which drew criticism for the Immigration Bureau’s disregard for human rights. This is because the proposed amendment is a continuation of the Japanese government’s immigration policy without any principles.
The proposed amendment would limit the number of applications for refugee status to two in principle, and would establish a new “supervision measure” that would allow them to live temporarily in society. However, the decision on whether or not to apply the measure will be left to the immigration authorities, not the judiciary. The proposed amendment also does not mention judicial involvement in detention or limits on the length of detention. It ignores calls for reform of the immigration authorities’ disregard for human rights, as revealed by the hunger strike death of a Nigerian man protesting long-term detention and the death of a Sri Lankan woman who failed to receive proper medical care. In April of this year, the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteurs recommended that the proposed amendments fail to meet international human rights standards. Yet, the Japanese government refuses to listen at all.
About 17,000 foreigners are caught illegally entering or remaining in Japan each year, and the Immigration Bureau is concerned about the approximately 3,000 people who are refused repatriation. However, the majority of them are either born or raised in Japan or are refugee claimants who may face persecution in their home countries. The problem arises from the “long-term detention” of such people, which should be stopped and they should be recognized and accepted as refugees into society. The cause of the problem is Japan’s extremely low number and rate of refugee status compared to Western countries: in FY2021, only 74 refugees were recognized in Japan, and the refugee status rate was 0.7%, the lowest among G7 countries. The number and rate of refugee admissions in other countries are far greater than Japan’s: 38,918 in Germany (25.9%), 33,801 in France (62.1%), 32,571 in Canada (17.5%), 20,590 in the US (32.2%), and 13,703 in the UK (63.4%). Shouldn’t the first priority be to eliminate this abnormal state of “seclusion”?
However, the Japanese government’s attitude has been to strengthen deportation. The Refugee Convention, to which Japan is a signatory, prohibits the deportation of refugees while they are in the process of applying for refugee status, but the Japanese government has included a limit on the number of applications in the new bill, claiming that repeated applications are the cause of long-term detention. This restriction violates international norms for refugee protection, as one of the first Turkish Kurds to be granted refugee status in the summer of 2022 had been refused twice by the immigration authorities before. He was granted refugee status following a ruling by the Sapporo High Court that reversed the immigration authorities’ decision, but he would have been deported if the revised bill had been enacted.
Even with the new supervision measures, the system of indefinite detention, which the United Nations has criticized as a violation of international human rights covenants, remains untouched. A suggestion that judicial review should intervene in detention was also not considered. After the deaths at the Nagoya Immigration Office, the then Minister of Justice apologized, saying that he had neglected to recognize that he was dealing with people as an incarceration facility, but the proposed amendments show that the government’s disregard for human rights has not changed.
Behind the Japanese government’s decision to revise the law is the promotion of accepting “foreign workers” as a way to solve the labor shortage. The message is that the government will ease up drastically on accepting foreign workers, but will maintain its strict immigration policy as before. However, is it really a good thing for Japan to maintain its strict immigration policy? There are 100 million refugees in the world. (UN statistics for 2022). In 2022, Japan accepted 202 refugees (147 of them were Afghans) and rejected more than 10,000 refugee applicants. A change in immigration policy is essential to accept refugees with respect for human rights.
The Yayoi people of ancient Japan were immigrants of continental descent. In the subsequent history, Japan has been a nation that has accepted and developed through immigrants and foreign knowledge, such as the introduction of letters, religion, and laws from China and Korea when the capital was built in Nara (7-8th century), the acceptance of Spanish and Portuguese in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (late 16th century), the acceptance of Westerners in the Meiji period (late 19th century), and Korean immigrants before and during the World War II. Japan should stop its half-hearted status quo immigration policy based on the illusion of being a mono-ethnic nation, and switch to a clear policy of respecting human rights to accept refugees, and promoting immigration to relieve labor shortages.