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How foreign embassies and consulates in China deal with North Korean refugees has been the subject of more than one international diplomatic incident. Recent news coverage in both Japan and Korea suggests that Japan may have formally capitulated on the issue, signing a pledge not to harbor North Korean defectors.
Embassy incidents began in 2001, when seven members of a North Korean family sought refuge in a United Nations office in Beijing. A group of 25 entered the Spanish embassy in March of 2002 and were ultimately given permission to go to the Philippines before heading for South Korea.
The most infamous episode, however, occurred in May 2002 at the Japanese consulate in Shenyang. The facts are not in serious dispute. At about 2 p.m. on May 8, two men, two women and a girl attempted to enter the consulate. They ended up in a wrestling match with several armed Chinese police officers who were on duty outside the consulate grounds. The two men successfully got through, but the two women and the girl were dragged out of the compound by the police (see the photo above). The question of whether the police violated the consulate space in the scuffle quickly became moot as the Chinese police entered the premises without Japanese consent and carted all five off to detention (and ultimate deportation back to North Korea as far as we know). The Koizumi government vigorously protested the incident as a violation of Chinese obligations with respect to foreign embassies and consulates (the government’s official position can be found here). The Chinese countered that protection of North Koreans in diplomatic buildings as well as outside them was against Chinese law.
You know which side we are on, but nothing is simple. Diplomatic missions do not enjoy extraterritorial status; they are not sovereign territory of the represented state. They are, however, protected by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the fact that the host country may not enter the grounds without permission (Art. 22 of the Vienna Convention) would seem to make the Shenyang incident an open-and-shut case.
But international law is far from clear on whether embassies and consulates have the right to protect refugees, and the Vienna Convention makes no reference to refugees. Moreover, some highly cynical detective work by Yoichi Shimatsu—initially published in the China Daily—suggests that there was much more to the incident than meets the eye. Why, Shimatsu asks, did a telephoto lens just happen to be pointed at the Japanese consulate in Shenyang on the afternoon of May 8?
The answer is that the incident might have been part of a larger campaign to embarrass the Chinese. Although we sympathize with the goals, the strategy of rushing embassies and consulates was just plain dumb; it probably accounts for the death of a number of refugees at North Korean hands, most notably the so-called “MoFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Seven,” who sought refugee status in a highly public way and were arrested and almost certainly deported.
But there’s more. It turns out that the Japanese were more complicit in turning over the North Koreans than the Koizumi government initially let on. Japanese diplomats had actively opposed opening their diplomatic facilities to DPRK refugees and may even have cooperated with the Chinese police during the Shenyang incident.
Policy became more complicated after 2006 when Japan passed a North Korean human rights act that obligated the government to play a more active role in protecting refugees. But in the run-up to the Olympics this policy put Japan and China on a collision course. Japan might be able to effectively harbor the refugees. But China had the hardball option of refusing them transit out of the country.
The Japanese pledge to China was the outcome of a negotiation that had been going on for several years over the disposition of five refugees holed up in the Shenyang consulate who had been granted protective custody in 2007 and 2008.
As we have repeated ad nauseum, including in the conclusion to Witness to Transformation, the real issue is that China has consistently refused to abide by its obligations under the refugee convention. The entire issue would be moot if they did. North Koreans would be granted refugee status in China itself, thus sparing us these periodic embassy and consulate dramas and the embarrassing pledges demanded by Beijing.
(Thanks to Takehiro Masutomo for bringing this story to our attention.)
