Friday, August 13,
1999 Human smugglers could face charges in
Korea
Chad Skelton
The Vancouver
Sun
VANCOUVER - The eight suspected Korean smugglers who dumped 130
migrants near a deserted B.C. island face prosecution if they are
returned home, the South Korean consulate in Vancouver said
yesterday.
"It is a crime under the Korean criminal law,"said Consul
Joonyong Park. "Aside from the penalty they receive here from the
Canadian law, they could be punished by the Korean law separately if
they committed the crime."
Mr. Park said the Korean law makes it a crime to organize human
smuggling operations -- including operations abroad -- though he
said he didn't know what the maximum penalty for that crime is.
Mr. Park said the law has been used several times because Koreans
have organized numerous illegal smuggling operations to bring
Chinese nationals to Korea by ship.
"Chinese people are smuggled into Korea with the co-operation of
some Koreans," he said. "There are many cases of that kind in
Korea."
How the migrants on this latest ship were recruited, how they
paid for the journey and what arrangements had been made for their
arrival here in Canada had not yet been determined by immigration
officials.
But migrants aboard the last ship told investigators that they
had paid up to $38,000 (US) for the journey -- an amount many of
them would have likely been forced to pay off upon their arrival.
That concerns one expert who thinks it is likely that those
refugee claimants who are released will likely be paid a visit by
someone working for the smuggling syndicates looking to collect.
"They've got money invested in them and they want to get it
back," said Sergeant Jim Fisher, an expert in Asian organized crime
with the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada in Ottawa.
So far, 86 of the 123 migrants from the first boat have been
released. The remaining 37 have been detained -- 17 because
Immigration Canada cannot identify them and 20 who they believe were
involved in the smuggling operation.
Authorities should take little comfort in the fact that they have
detained the suspected ringleaders of both smuggling ships, Sgt.
Fisher said. Most research on smuggling operations suggests they are
"compartmentalized," he said, with different groups responsible for
the recruitment, the voyage itself and collecting the debts here in
North America.
"It means that if you make an arrest with those guys on the last
ship, they might not be able to supply too much information about
what was going to happen to them after that," Sgt. Fisher said,
"because their contract was to bring them over and drop them at a
specific location and meet a certain person."
Assuming each migrant paid roughly the same amount for their
voyage, that makes each ship's human cargo worth more than
$4-million. Sgt. Fisher said organized Asian gangs can be ruthless
in making sure they are paid.
"There have been murders, there have been tortures -- to send a
message to delinquent payments," he said.
RELATED SITES:
(Each link opens a new window)
Citizenship and Immigration Canada
The brand-new white paper on immigration policy
Statistics Canada: Immigration and
Citizenship
Statistics from the 1996 national census that look at where
Canadians came from.
|
![[Festivals]](august13natpost6_files/frontfest.gif)
.gif){kind=small}
.gif){kind=small}