A Chinese dissident who fled to South Korea this week in a rubber boat will be transferred to an immigration detention center, 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 has served many prison terms over the years.
The longtime critic of China’s ruling Communist Party made several failed attempts to leave the country, including a 2019 attempt to swim to the Taiwanese territory of Kinmen and a 2020 trip to Vietnam, where he was arrested by local police.
He was found by South Korean authorities on Monday night leaving the country’s west coast in a 3.3-meter (11-foot) rubber boat with a 9.9-horsepower engine and questioned on suspicion of violating immigration laws.
Prosecutors asked the court to detain him, but the Daejeon District Court ruled that “arrest is not necessary” for the authorities’ investigation, a court spokesman told AFP on Thursday.
The court spokesman said Dong had two options: “If he is considered an illegal immigrant, it would be appropriate to transfer him to an immigration detention center. However, if he applies for refugee status, he can stay in the country in accordance with the Refugee Act.”
Following the court ruling, the dissident remained in police custody in Taean County, on South Korea’s west coast.
Dong will soon be transferred to the immigration office’s foreigner detention center, 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 officially processing refugee claims in 1994, with an overall low recognition rate despite tens of thousands of applications.
Critics say the low approval rate reflects strict scrutiny 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 fired from his police job after signing a petition a decade after Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to the US-based advocacy group China Human Rights.
He later spent about three years in prison from 2001 for “inciting the overthrow of state power,” United Nations experts said, and was arrested again in 2014 for Tiananmen-related activities.
Dong fled to Thailand with his family, who later settled in Canada as refugees, but Thai authorities handed him over to Chinese police in 2015, despite his UN-recognized refugee status.
