81. Korea ratified the United Nations’ Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish
Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United
Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime on November 25th,
2015. However, the country has not established a law or an institutional system
to provide support and protection for human trafficking victims according to this
protocol. Unlike Korean sex traffic victims, foreign human trafficking victims need
protection and assistance in special issues such as residence, stay and returning
to the home country. In addition, interpretation service for identification of
human trafficking victims is needed due to a language barrier on top of training
for workers at agencies handling criminal matters. Thus, it is urgently required to
establish a law and a system to provide protection and assistance for human
trafficking victims, meeting the minimum standard of the protocol.
[20] Reinforcement of Human Rights Protection for Marriage Migrants (List of
Issues 13)
82. For the past decade, as many as 19 marriage immigrants were killed by spouses
or family members after suffering from domestic violence according to data
collected by the Women Migrants Human Rights Center of Korea (June, 2017).29
Most of them were murdered by husbands or cohabiting men and in two cases,
women migrants were killed by her fathers-in-law. Although there is no official
statistics on the number of women migrants suffering from domestic violence, it
is estimated that about seven percent of them are exposed to domestic violence
when comparing the number of foreign women married to Korean men (185,000)
to the number of domestic violence counseling cases (13,000) registered at
‘Danuri
Call
Center’,
a
comprehensive
information
and call
center
for
multicultural families in 201630.
83. When breaking down the counseling cases at ‘Danuri Call Center’ by issues, the
29 (2017. 6. 26) Press Release from the Women Migrants Human Rights Center of Korea “Deaths of women migrants, I
could become the woman migrant from Vietnam myself.” (June 26 th, 2017)
30 SBS News Report File, The Cruel Story of Women Migrant, “Nowhere to report even in case of violence” (July 31 st,
2017)