The number of asylum applications hit a record high in South Korea last year, with people from Egypt, Pakistan and China dominating the list of asylum seekers, a U.N. report showed Thursday.
South Korea recorded 2,900 asylum applications in 2014, up 81 percent from the 1,600 tallied in the previous year, according to a 2014 report on asylum trends released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The report analyzed the trends of asylum claims in 44 industrialized countries last year.
The 2014 data for South Korea marked the highest level since 1992, when the U.N. started to tally related data and the South Korean government began to receive applications from asylum seekers.
Egypt topped the list of countries of origin for asylum seekers in South Korea, followed by Pakistan and China, the report said, without elaborating on reasons why people from such nations chose Seoul.
Asylum claims in South Korea have been rising steadily. In 2012, the number of cases stood at 1,140, up from 1,010 in 2011 and 430 in 2010.
“We can speculate that it is partly a ‘spillover’ from the ongoing emergencies around the world such as Syria,” said Heinn Shin, a press officer at the South Korean office of the U.N. refugee agency. “The increasing number of people fleeing around the world is obviously also having an impact on the asylum trends in Korea.”
The report estimated that there were 866,000 new asylum claims in industrialized countries last year, up 45 percent from a year earlier. The 2014 data also marked the highest level since 1992, when conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina began.
“Today, the surge in armed conflicts around the world presents us with similar challenges, in particular the dramatic situation in Syria,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
Syrians topped the list of asylum seekers in 2014 with about 150,000 applications, followed by Iraqis with 68,700 applications and Afghans with almost 60,000 claims, the report showed.
Germany received the most asylum applications with more than 173,000, compared with the United States with about 121,200 claims and Turkey with 87,800, it added. (Yonhap)
