Refugee Protection in Japan and Canada: Some Musings on Sovereignty, Borders and Human Rights

Guest Speaker: Kohki Abe, Professor of International Law & Peace Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, Japan Discussant: Idil Atak, Professor, Lincoln Alexander School of Law, Toronto Metropolitan University While Canada is widely considered a nation of immigrants and a leading country for protecting refugees, Japan is infamous for its strict social ordering and non-acceptance of immigrants and refugees. These respective national ideologies or narratives, however, are profoundly shaken by the contemporary political dynamics. As Canada is developing into a cohesive nation wherein new Canadian ethnicity emerges (on dispossession of Indigenous Peoples), its asylum system is increasingly loaded with measures for unrecognizing refugees ostensibly to maintain fraud/danger-free communal solidarity. Interestingly, Japan seems to be opening up its otherwise closed national border for foreigners and refugees as it aims to build a ‘multicultural convivial society’, thus making the post-war myth of a monolithic nation a thing of the past. The ongoing developments in both countries indicate that refugee protection/acceptance is fundamentally immigration-based and that it is directly relevant to the sovereign scheme of nation-building/maintaining. The focus of my small talk is on the practice of Refugee Status Determination in Japan as it is compared with that of Canada. It is intended to show how refugees have been excluded from (and recently are selectively integrated into) our nation-building/maintaining scheme. It also critically analyzes how international human rights/refugee law has been domesticated and emaciated in the staunch administrative and judicial processes to sustain fortress Japan. ABE Kohki is a Visiting Scholar at CRS and Professor of International Law & Peace Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, Japan. Past Presidents of Japanese Society of International Human Rights Law, Peace Studies Association of Japan and Human Rights Now (Japan-based international NGO), he also served as a Refugee Examination Counselor for the Minister of Justice for ten years (2012-2022). Currently he is Co-Representative of Refugee Studies Forum, Japan and Executive Council Member of Japan Branch of the Asian Society of International Law. His major publications in English are as follows: “For Belated Justice in International Law: Righting Historical Wrongs in East Asia”, in International Law as Constructive Resistance towards Peace and Justice (Brill, 2024) “The Emergence of the Right Not to Be Forcibly Disappeared: Some Comments”, in Andreas von Arnauld et.al. (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of New Human Rights: Recognition, Novelty, Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2020) “International Law as Memorial Sites: The ‘Comfort Women’ Lawsuits Revisited”, Korean Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol.1 (2013) “Implementation of Universal Human Rights Standards in Japan: An Interface of National and International Law” in Rainer Arnold (ed.), The Universalism of Human Rights (Springer, 2012) Overview of Statelessness: International and Japanese Contexts (UNHCR Japan, 2010) “Are You a Good Refugee or a Bad Refugee?: Security Concerns and Dehumanization of Immigration Policies in Japan”, University of New England Asia Center, Asia Papers No.16 (2007) “Dynamics of International Human Rights in Japan”, Refuge (York University Center for Refugee Studies),Vol. 18, No.2 (1999)