July 2004
Human rights conditions in South Korea have improved dramatically over the past two decades. The military dictatorship that once detained and tortured student activists and dissidents with virtual impunity is gone. Arbitrary arrests, “disappearances,” and torture of dissidents are no longer the norm. However, South Korea still is far from a human rights haven. Among the most serious issues are the rights of migrant workers, physical abuse of sex workers, imprisonment of conscientious objectors, and the continuing use of security legislation by successive governments to detain and imprison individuals believed sympathetic to North Korea’s communist ideology.
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South Korea accepted hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in the 1990s as so-called “industrial trainees.” Most were unskilled workers from Southeast Asia who came to the country for a few months to learn specific skills while earning the minimum wage. Many stayed in South Korea after their visa expired, becoming illegal immigrants and thus vulnerable to abuse and mistreatment by unscrupulous employers. Some employers have refused to pay minimum wage, confiscated passports, and forced workers who had work-related accidents to return to their home countries without any compensation.
According to South Korea’s justice ministry, the number of migrant workers illegally staying in South Korea reached 301,700 in 2003. In August 2003, South Korea passed a law allowing firms to legally employ undocumented workers who had stayed in the country for less than four years. Those who had stayed for more than four years, however, were asked to leave the country by a mid-November deadline, with a promise that they would be allowed to return after six months so long as they first obtained legal work permits.
By January 2004, more than half of the migrant workers had obtained legal status, while some voluntarily left and thousands were deported. Some 100,000 undocumented workers remain in South Korea. Many refuse to leave because they do not believe they will be allowed to return to South Korea. South Korea insists the new system is designed to help resolve the chronic abuse and mistreatment of undocumented workers by giving them legal status; labor activists say that police have used excessive force in arresting undocumented workers and have denied their rights to legal counsel while in detention.
Sex Workers
South Korea bans prostitution by law, but in reality allows numerous brothels in red light districts in major cities and around U.S. military bases across the country. Many of the sex workers are kept in arbitrary detention and verbally and physically abused by their employers.
Migrant sex workers face even more serious abuse, as language and cultural barriers add to their vulnerable legal status. They pay a large sum of money to travel to South Korea, with either a tourist visa or an entertainer’s visa. Some come to South Korea with the explicit purpose of working as sex workers, but many come expecting to work as waitresses or bar dancers and are forced into prostitution by their employers. Bar or brothel owners often confiscate their passports and refuse to pay them until they pay off debts that they incurred in traveling to South Korea. Brothel owners take a large “commission” out of the women’s income and enforce arbitrary fines and fees, making it more difficult for the women to pay back the debts and forcing many to live in slavery-like conditions. Many of the migrant sex workers, whose numbers are estimated to be in the thousands, are from Russia, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries.
Conscientious Objectors
South Korea requires all healthy adult men to perform twenty-six months of mandatory military service. Those who refuse to serve in the military on moral or religious grounds are sent to prison to serve up to a three-year prison term. According to local rights organizations, the number of conscientious objectors who served prison terms between 1991 and 2000 reached over 3,500. Currently, about 1,600 conscientious objectors are in prison, most of them Christians belonging to the Jehovah's Witnesses. South Korea’s practice of sending conscientious objectors to prison goes against a 1998 U.N. resolution that calls on states that have yet to provide legal protections for conscientious objectors to establish "independent and impartial decision-making bodies with the task of determining whether a conscientious objection is genuinely held in a specific case." In 2004, a coalition of South Korean human rights organizations repeatedly urged the government to adopt alternative state service for conscientious objectors, but, at this writing, the government had yet to respond.
Security Legislation
South Korea’s National Security Law has been used by both military and civilian governments to arrest and imprison people accused of pro-North Korea activities. The law bans unauthorized contact with North Koreans, visits to North Korea, and “praising or supporting” North Korea, a vaguely-worded phrase often used by the government to arrest dissidents for peacefully expressing their views. Although punishment for such violations has become much more lenient under the current government, more than fifty people have been arrested for violating the law since Roh Mu-hyun took office in February 2003. About half of them were set free after being given suspended prison terms, while others are still on trial.
Death Penalty
According to South Korea’s justice ministry, 231 people were executed between 1976 and 1997. Seoul imposed an unofficial moratorium on executions in December 1997 when Kim Dae-Jung, a long-term democracy activist once sentenced to death himself, was elected president. The moratorium remains in place.
