South Korean Officials Defend Treatment of Moroccan Asylum Seeker in Detention Center

According to the explanations of the Korean Ministry of Justice, the Moroccan was sentenced to two criminal penalties in October 2020 and February 2021 for acts of violence. Arrived in South Korea in 2017, the thirty-year-old had applied for asylum before being the subject of an expulsion order. As a result, he was placed in a migrant detention center in Hwaseong. This man, who says he suffers from mental disorders, was placed in isolation more than a dozen times in the space of a few months. In a video released at the end of September, he is seen tied up, with his arms and legs behind his back and his belly on the ground. He is tied up and his head is covered with a cloth wrapped in tape and cables.

The Korean Ministry justifies this treatment, deemed "inhuman" by the circles defending human rights and migrants, and assures that these means were only used for a few minutes or up to 3 hours maximum. "During the detention period of the Moroccan citizen (from March 17, 2021 to August 30 of the same year), he repeatedly vandalized the center’s facilities and attacked the door between the protection room and the toilets, then broke the iron door and caused significant damage to a telephone line," report the Ministry of Justice and Korean diplomatic sources to Hespress.

The detainee is also accused of having "repeatedly damaged the center’s facilities, such as water pipes, windows, surveillance cameras, toilets," causing "water leaks" and "flooding in the hallway"; "assaulted and injured" the detention center agent, exposing "his genitals in front of the staff," "tried to injure himself after breaking the window, using sharp glass shards and trying to stab his neck or cut blood vessels."

After the video was published, there was an intervention by the Moroccan authorities in Seoul. The Moroccan embassy in Korea is handling the detainee’s case. For their part, the Korean authorities say they are in contact with the Moroccan authorities for the extradition of the young man. The defense of the latter intends to appeal to the Ministry of Justice for his release and to bring his case before the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the Committee against Torture.