Starting from December 1, internationals fleeing the war will be eligible for long-term resident status with a working visa in Japan under a revision to the immigration law, Japan’s immigration agency has said.
The new designation is aimed to help people fleeing conflict zones, such as Ukraine, whose circumstances are not in line with the requirements for refugee approval, VisaGuide.World reports.
According to the UN Convention on Refugees of 1951, a refuge is considered a person who is “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Japan has signed the convention, which obliges member countries to provide them protection; however, refugees from Ukraine and similarly displaced people do not meet the conditions.
According to Japan Today, some 2,091 Ukrainian evacuees were present in Japan as of September 20; of them, 1,931 reside in Japan under a designated activities visa for one year, based on the Immigration Services Agency of Japan.
Up to this point, Japanese authorities have granted refugee status to those strictly meeting these conditions. This sparked controversies that the country was closing its doors to those escaping humanitarian crises across the globe.
“We wanted to quickly implement this new system for those eligible for subsidiary protection, in particular, to bring some relief to the suffering of many people,” Justice Minister of Japan Ryuji Koizumi said in a news conference Tuesday.
The main beneficiaries of the new changes are Ukrainian citizens; however, asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Syria will also benefit.
In 2022, a total of 3,772 people applied for refugee status; however, only 202 were recognized as legal refugees, according to the data from the Justice Ministry. The same source shows that an additional 1,760 applicants, corresponding to a total of 46 percent of the total number of requests, were afforded residence status on humanitarian grounds.
However, the Japan Times shows that Ukrainian asylum-seekers are not part of such figures after they were classified as evacuees, not as refugees. As of last Friday, 2,506 citizens from Ukraine reached Japan since March 2022, and 2,091 continue to reside within the country.
Authorities in Japan have opened their doors to a large number of evacuees as well as asylum seekers from specific countries such as Afghanistan and Myanmar through the years.
