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His dream of teaching English in Japan ended with a lesson for the country

2021-12-06T01:10:41.520Z


Wishma Rathnayake from Sri Lanka traveled to Japan in 2017 to fulfill her dream of teaching English. But in March of this year he passed away, which has opened a great debate on immigration.


Wishma Rathnayake moved to Narita, Japan on a student visa in 2017.

(CNN) -

As a child, Wishma Rathnayake was fascinated by "Oshin," a popular 1980s television drama about a young woman rising out of poverty to run a supermarket chain in Japan.

Driven by her father to emulate her heroine, Rathnayake began to learn Japanese with the dream of one day moving to Japan from the small Sri Lankan town of Gampaha, northeast of Colombo.

When her father died, the college graduate convinced her mother that she could earn enough money working abroad as an English teacher to finance her retirement.

The family remortgage their home and, in 2017, Rathnayake moved to Narita, outside Tokyo, on a student visa.

Three years later, the woman passed away.

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After overriding her visa, Rathnayake was detained in Japan's immigration system, where she died on March 6, 2021, at the age of 33.

Rathnayake's case made headlines in Japan and fueled debate over the treatment of foreigners in the country, where 27 detained immigrants have died since 1997, according to the Japanese Refugee Lawyers Network.

His death has also exposed the lack of transparency of a system in which people can languish for years with no expectation of release, a system his sisters are campaigning to change.

Wishma Rathnayake (center) with her younger sisters, Poornima Rathnayake (left) and Wayomi Rathnayake (right).

Chasing a dream in Japan

Rathnayake was 29 when she arrived in Narita, and her Facebook was soon filled with images of sights and new friends.

From Sri Lanka, her younger sisters, Wayomi and Poornima, learned that she was attending language classes and that she seemed to be happy.

"He never told us or gave us a sign that things were not going well for him," says Wayomi Rathnayake, who is now 29 years old.

What her sisters did not know is that Wishma Rathnayake stopped attending language classes in May 2018 and was subsequently expelled.

That same month, he began working in a factory before applying for asylum in September.

Her application was rejected in January 2019, and since then she has been considered an illegal immigrant.

Phone calls to his home became less frequent, and in August 2020 the reason was clear.

That month, Rathnayake approached a Shizuoka prefectural police station, far from her home, seeking help to leave her partner.

Rathnayake told officers that his visa had expired and that he wanted to go to the Nagoya Regional Immigration Office, but did not have enough money to get there, according to Yasunori Matsui, director of START, a non-profit organization that helps to foreigners detained in Japan.

People who oppose the amendment of Japan's immigration control and refugee recognition law march in Tokyo on May 16, 2021.

Rathnayake initially agreed to return to Sri Lanka, but changed her mind after her partner wrote her two letters threatening to locate and punish her if she returned home, according to Matsui.

"She believed that she would be killed by him," said Matsui, who met Rathnayake at the immigration office in December 2020.

The first time her sisters knew she was in trouble was in March 2021, when the Sri Lankan embassy in Tokyo called to say she was dead.

Rathnayake's family asked for a report and photographic evidence, but their requests went unanswered, and in May his younger sisters traveled to Japan to search for the truth.

When they arrived, they saw Rathnayake in a funeral coffin in Nagoya.

"He looked so different, so weak and unrecognizable. His skin was wrinkled like that of an old person, and it was firmly attached to his bones," said 27-year-old Poornima Rathnayake.

During the seven months in detention, he had lost 20 kilos.

Her sisters wanted to know why.

Most of all, they wanted to see closed-circuit video of his last weeks in detention.

But the authorities denied them access.

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A broken system

For three months, the sisters and their legal team mobilized to obtain answers, meeting with officials and demanding the publication of the video.

Their demands were supported by supporters and some politicians who advocated strengthening the rights of foreigners in Japan, and this year the decision to publish the images or not became one of the main focuses of debate in the Japanese Parliament.

At the time, Japanese lawmakers were debating a bill that would have reformed the rules governing detained foreigners, including provisions to deport people after two failed refugee protection applications.

The aim of the bill was to reduce the number of immigrants in Japanese detention centers, which had risen to 1,054 in 2020, according to data from the Japan Immigration Agency.

But rights groups, including a group of United Nations experts, claimed that elements of the bill threatened to violate international human rights standards.

For example, they said the deportation clause could violate the principle of non-refoulement by forcing people to go to countries where they fear persecution.

"The controversy surrounding the bill contributed to a national debate surrounding his death and the question of how foreigners are treated in Japan," said Kosuke Oie, an immigration lawyer who supports his family.

Ultimately, the bill was scrapped.

Japan has traditionally had a low admission of immigrants, although in recent years it began to accept more foreign workers.

In 2018, Japanese lawmakers approved a policy change proposed by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that created new visa categories to allow some 340,000 foreign workers to fill high-skill, low-wage jobs.

And in a major change last month, the Japanese government said it was considering allowing foreigners in certain specialized jobs to stay indefinitely, as early as 2022.

But there are those who say that Japan has a long way to go and that Rathnayake's death highlights an immigration system that needs urgent reform.

Sanae Fujita, a researcher at the University of Essex School of Law, says the main problem is that the Japanese immigration office has great power and is not accountable to anyone.

"Unlike other countries, in Japan the immigration process is managed solely by the immigration agency, without the courts involved," he explains.

"This lack of judicial review has led to what some have called a 'black box' process, without supervision."

In 2019, Human Rights Now called for a ban on arbitrary detention at Japanese immigration facilities and related legal reforms, following a hunger strike by 198 detainees at Japanese immigration facilities.

In a statement, the rights group said detention centers should be used as "a measure of last resort to reduce their excessive use."

Fujita argues that Rathnayake's death could have been prevented if the Japanese government had listened to the UN's human rights recommendations to the country.

These included the imposition of a maximum period of detention and the possibility for detainees to request an independent review of their case.

A spokesman for the Immigration Services Agency declined to comment on Fujita's allegations.

Wishma Rathnayake's family attended a parliamentary session of Japan's lower house in Tokyo on May 18, 2021.

"Treated like an animal"

In August, a report by the Japan Immigration Services Agency, with independent experts including medical professionals, concluded that the Nagoya Regional Immigration Office had failed to provide Rathnayake with adequate medical care.

Senior officials and supervisors at the center were admonished, and Japan's Minister of Justice and the director of the Immigration Services Agency issued a formal apology for his death.

And, for the first time in an immigrant death case, officials allowed Rathnayake's sisters to view a two-hour edited video showing their last two weeks in detention.

They could only see half.

Poornima Rathnayake said the video made her feel physically ill.

Wayomi Rathnayake told reporters just after seeing him that the clips showed his sister falling out of bed and the guards laughing as milk poured from their nostrils.

"In the video, the guards were telling Wishma to get up on her own. (Her) repeated calls for help went unanswered as the guards urged her to go back to bed by herself. She tried to get their attention, but they ignored her," Wayomi Rathnayake told CNN.

Some sections were edited, suggesting that officials were hiding the truth, he said.

"What I saw in the clips bothered me so much that I felt there was something much worse to see."

The sisters finally viewed longer clips of raw video in October.

In them you could see how the staff tried to feed Rathnayake, even though he could not hold anything back.

And the day before her death, staff did not call an ambulance, although she did not respond to their calls, said Oie, the family's attorney.

Rathnayake, whose visa had expired, turned to the police for help to leave her partner.

Treatment was denied

The Immigration Services Agency report found that Rathnayake had complained of stomach pain and other symptoms for months before his death.

The report notes that he underwent medical tests such as urinalysis, blood tests and chest X-rays to determine the cause of the problem.

However, on the day of his death, the center's staff was slow to call emergency services, even as his condition appeared to be deteriorating.

According to the report, in the months before his death, Rathnayake had cooperated with immigration authorities, but his demeanor changed when he decided that he wanted to stay in Japan.

The report alleges that her defenders had told her that she would be more likely to be provisionally released if she was ill, a claim that the detainee's defender, Matsui, refutes.

Probation allows detainees to live in the community while awaiting deportation.

Matsui said that in January he urged officials to transfer Rathnayake to hospital or to grant her provisional release, so that her defenders could take her themselves.

Another request was made in February, when Rathnayake had become so weakened that he could no longer grasp a pen, according to Matsui.

But these requests were rejected without any reason being given, Matsui said.

Yoichi Kinoshita, a former immigration official who now runs a non-profit organization that aims to reform the country's immigration system, says the guards appeared to dismiss his complaints.

"Some people who worked at the detention center probably thought that he was exaggerating his symptoms because he wanted to be released on parole," Kinoshita said.

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Review of a dysfunctional system in Japan

Last month, Rathnayake's sisters filed a criminal complaint against senior officials at the Nagoya Regional Immigration Office, alleging willful negligence.

Although the previous immigration investigation found shortcomings in the system, it did not establish why he died or who the culprit is, according to Oie, the family's attorney.

So far, the family's campaign for justice has garnered small but significant victories for others trapped in the system.

"The immigration agency had never shown a video to a family and the director of the immigration agency also did not apologize for the deaths of the detainees - this is all news," Kinoshita said.

He asserts that greater oversight of the agency that controls all aspects of the fate of the detainees is necessary.

"The immigration office controls everything, from visas for foreigners, their detention and deportation, to their provisional release. There needs to be a third party who offers a different perspective, and that could be the court," he said.

The Immigration Services Agency has proposed some changes after Rathnayake's death.

In the August report, he said he would try to strengthen the medical care offered in immigration detention centers and possibly allow sick detainees to be temporarily released.

Plans are also proposed to assess the behavior of immigration officials, including complaints from defenders of detainees.

For the Rathnayake sisters, the mental strain of the fight for justice has taken its toll.

Wishma's younger sister Wayomi, 29, returned to Sri Lanka at the end of October due to psychological stress caused by viewing images of her detained sister.

But for Poornima Rathnayake, who has stayed in Japan, the fight continues.

"We want those responsible for Wishma's death to be held accountable, because we hope that this type of untimely death will not happen to anyone again," he said.

"Tomorrow it could be someone else's brother, sister, friend, mother or father."

Immigration Japan

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2021-12-06

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