[Anchor]
It has been revealed that a local government office in Jeollabuk-do has been confiscating and storing the passports of foreign seasonal workers in bulk. While there have been frequent cases of employers or brokers seizing migrant workers' passports, it is highly unusual for a local government itself to step in and withhold passports.
Reporter Jeong Banseok has an exclusive report.
[Reporter]
A farm in Jeongeup, Jeollabuk-do.
Karen, a seasonal worker from the Philippines who arrived in early May, submitted her passport to the Jeongeup city government on her first day in the country for alien registration and other procedures.
For more than four months since then, she has not been able to get her passport back.
Our reporting team visited the city hall together with Karen.
The city responded that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed with the local government in the Philippines included provisions for passport custody.
[Jeongeup City Official: The Philippines requested it. That is included in the MOU conditions.]
When asked to show the agreement, the official changed their statement, admitting that no such provision existed.
Instead, the official explained that because there had been many instances of seasonal workers leaving their workplaces in the past, they tried to prevent it.
[Jeongeup City Official: To prevent desertion. Passports are needed here when leaving the country, and we were protecting them here in the meantime.]
Employers also chimed in.
[Employer: If she had her passport, wouldn't she have run away without a word? The conclusion is that it was actually better to leave them with the city hall.]
Depriving individuals of their passports or refusing requests to return them is one of the key criteria used by the government to identify victims of human trafficking.
When an immigration investigator from the Ministry of Justice dispatched to the scene urged the return of the passport,
[Immigration Authority Official: You need to hand over the passport now, you need to hand it over.]
Only then did they bring out the passports stored somewhere.
There are about 160 seasonal workers who came to Jeongeup along with Karen.
The Jeongeup city government conducted an inspection of human rights conditions for seasonal workers in late May, yet it was the city government itself that was holding the workers' passports.
[Jeongeup City Official: I think that if this worker had worked diligently, things wouldn't have come to this point.]
The human rights inspection checklist created by the Ministry of Justice includes an item asking whether seasonal workers have had their passports confiscated.
[Koh Ki-bok, Director of the Migration and Human Rights Center for All: There is a (human rights condition) checklist. Just looking at that would make them realize how grave of a mistake they are committing.]
Jeongeup city stated that due to administrative inexperience, it had kept the passports of about 60 workers, and that all of them had been returned following SBS's reporting.
(Video Journalist: Shin So-young | Video Editor: Choi Hye-ran | Designer: Han Heung-su)
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