A Chinese dissident who fled to South Korea this week in a rubber boat will be transferred to an immigration detention centre, police told AFP on Thursday.
Dong Guangping, a 68-year-old former policeman, has been a thorn in Beijing’s side for advocating political reform and human rights and served multiple prison stints over the years.
The longtime critic of China’s ruling Communist Party made several failed attempts to flee the country, including a 2019 bid to swim to the Taiwanese territory of Kinmen and a 2020 trip to Vietnam where he was detained by local police.
He was found by South Korean authorities on Monday night drifting off the country’s west coast on a 3.3-metre (11-foot) rubber boat with a 9.9-horsepower engine, and was questioned on suspicion of violating immigration laws.
Prosecutors asked the court to detain him, but the Daejeon District Court determined that “detention is not necessary” for the authorities’ investigation, a court spokesperson told AFP on Thursday.
The court spokesperson said Dong had two options: “If he is deemed an illegal immigrant, it would be appropriate to transfer him to an immigration detention centre. However, if he applies for refugee status, he can stay in the country in accordance with the Refugee Act.”
After the court’s determination, the dissident remained in police custody in Taean county, on South Korea’s western coast.
Dong will soon be transferred to the immigration office’s foreign detention centre, police in Taean told AFP.
Dong’s lawyer did not immediately return AFP’s requests for comment. Seoul’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
South Korea has granted political asylum to relatively few applicants since it began formally processing refugee claims in 1994, with an overall recognition rate in the low single digits despite tens of thousands of applications.
Critics say the low approval rate reflects strict screening and lengthy procedures, while the government maintains that decisions are made on a case-by-case basis and take security considerations into account.
Dong was dismissed from his work as a policeman after signing a petition a decade after Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to US-based advocacy group Human Rights in China.
He later spent about three years in prison from 2001 for “inciting subversion of state power”, United Nations experts said, and was detained again in 2014 over Tiananmen-related activities.
Dong fled to Thailand with his family, who later resettled in Canada as refugees, but Thai authorities handed him over to Chinese police in 2015 despite his UN-recognised refugee status.
