Korea plans to accept 30 Burmese (Myanmar) refugees from temporary camps in Thailand and grant them permanent settlement, the Ministry of Justice said on Sunday.
The plan is in accordance with a U.N. agency resettlement program that the country joined last year. It is the second of its kind since Korea brought in 22 Myanmar refugees under the program last December.
The new group of refugees will arrive at Incheon International Airport as early as this month.
The ministry has selected the 30 refugees on the recommendation of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) after conducting a document review and holding interviews between June and September.
The resettlement program is to transfer refugees living in temporary camps in an asylum country to another country that has agreed to accept them.
About 30 countries, including Korea, Japan, Australia and the United States, have joined the UNHCR program.
The first 22 refugees arrived in Korea in December. The four families started their new lives in Seoul and surrounding Gyeonggi Province last month after learning Korean and receiving job training for 10 months under the resettlement education program.
Despite the proactive policy to admit refugees, the nation’s refugee acceptance rate has remained low.
The acceptance rate fell to 1.84 percent last year from 5.25 percent in 2012, according to the ministry. The comparable figure stood at 3.62 percent in 2014 and 2.76 percent in the first half of 2016.
The figures were far lower than the global average acceptance rate of 37 percent, according to UNHCR data.
Last year, only 105 out of 5,711 applicants were awarded refugee status, while 94 out of 2,896 were accepted the year before.

[contributed by Tenzing Wangdi, Siliguri, based on news sources]

  korea, Myanmar, refugees, South Asia, UNHCR