Thursday, December 13, 2007

deported!

It appears that MTU general secretary Masum has been deported. The others have probably have been as well, or so I gander from reading this:

So today the High Court officially refused to hear the appeal for Masum, Kajiman and Raju's release. Which means we are pretty much out of legal avenues to fight for their release. I heard from a Nepalese friend today that Raju and Kajiman have both been cleared by the Nepalese embassy for travel and it looks like they will probably be gone by tomorrow.

Unfortunately they will all probably just disappear without being able to make any phone calls, so we won't know that they are gone for sure until they find phones in whatever countries they have lay-overs in.
I'll update more info as I get it.

3 comments:

  1. I sent a protest email to president@cwd.go.kr, only to discover that Plastic Man's staff had already shut me out: "sender was rejected." Something I'd communicated earlier had apparently hurt someone's feelings. I sent the protest from another account, which will no doubt be duly blocked.

    My point: not even Bush's team of insane troglodytes blocks senders. And Roh is called a liberal, ffs!

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  2. Very disheartening.

    The issue of migrant workers is a tricky subject with no right answer, but THIS is not what you would expect from a so called democratic government led by a former labor rights lawyer.

    By the way, could you point me to any examples of other countries on their successful(i.e., reasonable) dealing with the so called 'illegal' migrant workers. Does the ILO have any guideline on this? Thanks.

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  3. It's complicated.

    Technically, the Seoul High Courts decision to recognize the migrant trade union could be seen as progressive.

    Procedurally, though, South Korea is not very fair in dealing with the basic human rights of the undocumented. It seems that there is no procedural concept of rights in dealing with undocumented people. Even some jurisdictions in the US is better in these regards.

    As for the cause of numbers of undocumented in South Korea, i think it would be very easy to deal with if they labour rights the priority and designed their policies with more input from the workers themselves many of whom have really just been the victims of having their status changed continually each time the law changes.

    The ILO supports the UN convention on the treatment of migrant workers and their families. State sovereignty is still upheld in this convention in the area of undocumented migrants, nonetheless few migrant receiving countries, if any, have signed it, which speaks to lack of progress on the area of migrants in general.

    I'm not sure of how their policies work in general, but I think Spain these days has been doing a lot of things to regularize and recognize migrant workers. A bit of an exception I believe.

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