Is it possible to imagine the life of a child without state recognition, access to health and education?
This rhetorical question might not be that far from the reality of those approximately 20.000 undocumented migrant children living in the Republic of South Korea (ROK) (Bo-gyung, K, 2019). The measurements and immigration policy body of ROK have shown not to be humanitarian but rigid, and discriminatory towards the forced migratory crisis for the last decade. Moreover, it has shown to be indifferent to the incongruences being committed by limiting migrant children to their access to their essential rights, despite having ratified the
Convention on the Rights of the Child on 1991 as well as have acceded to the 1951 Refugee Convention in 1992 (The United Nations, 2019). According to a study conducted by the coalition of Korean NGOs Network, the limited laws and policies of the ROK, exclude or deny migrant children’s rights to be protected, due that they are not Korean citizens even though have been born in ROK. Simultaneously, and within this group, undocumented children are denied enjoying their rights as minors and interrupted from their right to stay, being subjected to sudden deportations. Thus, this report specified seven rights as the most urgent to be treated due to the high incidence on their violation, among the pertinent to this study those are: the rights to birth registration, health, and education (Korea Refugee Rights Network; MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society; Network for the Rights of Children and Adolescents with Migrant Background; Network for Universal Birth Registration, 2019). In this sense, it has been crucial to identifying who else are the actors that have positively been responding upon this migrant child crisis in ROK. Indeed, those initiatives and actions are attributed to the South Korean civil society. Their contribution has been extrapolated in a handful of aspects regarding this problematic. Among those, there are organizations and individuals dedicated to working for childcare, education, among other dependencies. In this study, the efforts of two organizations that work for the protection of migrant children’s rights in the fields of legal support and the suggestion for improvements on the current policy status for migrant children will be explored as the main topic. Moreover, this study will reveal the personal view of this societal sphere towards the children migrant crisis and prove that there is still hope for the world to change into a cosmopolitan and humanitarian one.
Comments