Japan's asylum problem: lessons from Sri Lankan detainee's death 'still not learnt', activists say

A little more than two years after a Sri Lankan woman died in an immigration facility in Nagoya, with her pleas for medical help ignored by staff, activists say Japan does not appear to have learned the lessons of a human rights case that made headlines around the world.

Campaigners for the rights of immigrants, including asylum seekers and people awaiting deportation, say there is still no effective oversight of the government agencies tasked with handling those in detention and far too little understanding in the government and among the public of the plight of many of these men, women and children.

In March 2021, Ratnayake Liyanage Wishma Sandamali, a 33-year-old Sri Lankan woman, died at the Nagoya Regional Immigration Services Bureau. After a protracted legal battle by her sisters, the bureau eventually released security footage of her final days, showing Sandamali falling to the floor from her bunk and pleading with two workers for assistance. Left untreated, she died a few hours later.

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Under pressure from lawyers and human rights groups, the Immigration Services Agency of Japan has confirmed that 18 foreign nationals - some fleeing civil war in their homelands, others persecuted for their religion, political beliefs, gender or sexual orientation - have died in detention facilities across the country since 2007.

On June 4, the Tokyo District Court ordered the national government and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to pay compensation to the family of a Nepalese man accused of theft who died in police custody after he was restrained. And while the ruling was welcomed, the figure the court decided on as compensation - 1 million yen (US$7,180) - was widely dismissed as derisory for the loss of a life.

There has been a steady flow of similar cases being picked up by a media that has become more attuned to the authorities' behaviour since Sandamali's death in custody. The Osaka regional immigration bureau announced on May 30 that it had launched an internal investigation after learning that a female doctor who had been on duty to examine detainees was drunk.

In April a court ordered the government to pay a Kurdish man compensation of 200,000 yen for being assaulted by immigration staff while in detention.

In November, an Italian man in his 50s committed suicide at a detention facility in Tokyo after being refused provisional release before being deported.

Human rights campaigners were further incensed last month when Mizuho Umemura, a member of the opposition Nippon Ishi party, claimed that Sandamali could have been faking her illness or that she had been on a hunger strike in order to be granted temporary release from the immigration centre. The party sacked Umemura from the Diet committee on judicial affairs the following day.

"Her comments in the Diet really shocked me," said Kazuko Ito, a lawyer and secretary general of the Japan-based Human Rights Now.

"Unfortunately, we see these sorts of attitudes growing in Japanese politics today, while discrimination and nationalistic sentiment are also growing among the general public here," she said. "It is becoming easier to attack minorities, foreigners, women."

The "fundamental problem" afflicting Japan's immigration system is that there is no supervisory authority to ensure that inmates' human rights are protected and that transgressions are properly investigated and wrongdoing punished, Ito said.

"Control of the centres comes under the Ministry of Justice but the abuses are just not stopping, so we believe there needs to be a truly independent authority to supervise these facilities, but that is just not happening."

In contrast, Japan seems to be tightening the rules covering immigrants, passing a controversial revision to the immigration law on May 9 that makes it easier for authorities to deport people, even if they are still awaiting a decision on refugee status. The government said the previous system was being abused because it permitted applicants to make repeated appeals; opponents insisted it will mean people at risk of being persecuted in their home countries being returned sooner.

A Justice Ministry spokesperson told This Week in Asia that a report into Sandamali's death was available in Japanese on the ministry's website. The official directed all further requests for information to the site.

Shiho Tanaka, a spokeswoman for the Japan Association for Refugees, said there had been an increase in reports of abuse of detainees at the nation's immigration facilities in the last decade, describing it as a "long-standing problem".

"The immigration centres have an attitude that they need to 'control' foreigners, and a weak understanding of the need to protect or even respect their human rights," she said.

Tanaka said a group of rights lawyers had recently visited Britain to see how comparable detention centres were operated and were "amazed" at how different the regimes were.

"Inmates there have a lot of freedom and their human rights are guaranteed, but here in Japan we still have this assumption of the need to control detainees," she said.

The system was also plagued with structural problems and inadequacies, Tanaka said, meaning that some detainees had been behind bars for a decade while awaiting a decision on their application for refugee status.

Tanaka believes it is positive that the domestic media is at last picking up on reports of inmates being abused and dying of completely avoidable causes, and says Japan cannot ignore the negative publicity this generates in foreign countries when one of their nationals dies in custody here. But she is pessimistic about meaningful changes in the attitude of Japanese authorities.

"It is good that the issue is getting more media coverage and young people are increasingly aware of these problems, and I would hope that the government cares about these people, but too often the system just does not work," she said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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