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Discrimination is ‘on the rise’Rights group says it underscores people's antipathy towards a multi-cultural society
Mass for migrant workers at Hyehwa-dong Church in Seoul
Discrimination against foreigners in South Korea has doubled in recent years, a national human rights body said yesterday, underscoring what a Catholic rights activist calls a national indifference towards multi-culturalism.
The National Human Rights Commission of Korea revealed that foreigners say they have been discriminated against based upon their race, religion or country and that the number of complaints is increasing each year.
There were 32 recorded cases in 2005 compared to 64 in 2010.
However, the commission believes there are a far greater number that have gone unreported and that the increasing number of cases is undermining South Korea’s status as a multi-cultural society.
Statistics at the end of 2010 revealed that 1.26 million foreigners from around 50 countries lived in South Korea, which has a population of some 48 million.
Andrew Kim Duck-jin from the Catholic Human Rights Committee said many South Koreans dislike people from Southeast and South Asia and Africans.
The committee secretary said the lauding of Korean society by the right-wing perpetrator of last week’s mass murder in Norway in his manifesto, is an indicator to what Koreans think about multi-culturalism.
He also said South Korean government policies promoting multiculturalism in recent years have been half-hearted.
Father Francis Kim Chong-dae, director of Yiutsari, a Jesuit center for migrants, said the government’s main efforts are focused on a few elite foreigners mainly from Western countries.
He said 60 percent of the government’s budget for migrants goes to these few, while foreigners married to Koreans get 35 percent but only five percent goes to more than 600,000 migrant workers.
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