Cape Town - South Africans rank among the top 10 nationalities of people seeking asylum in South Korea, a UN study has revealed.
The UN Human Rights Commission’s Asylum Trends report said that 22 South Africans had applied for asylum in the East Asia country in the first six months of this year.
This ranking placed them joint eighth on the list of asylum applicants, along with Uganda and Liberia. Egypt was first, with 113 applicants.
“To the extent possible, the statistics presented reflect the number of individuals lodging an asylum application for the first time,” stated the report.
The report contains information on “new claims made at the first instance of asylum procedures,” and not how many asylum applications were successfully granted.
It does not give information of the names or ages of applicants, recording only their country of origin.
The report’s authors noted that while more than 1 000 people tried to seek asylum in South Korea in the first six months of the year, this number was low compared to applications received by other industrialised countries.
Weekend Argus