### Chapter 6. Promotion of Appropriate and Prompt Refugee Protection

## Section 1 ☐ Promotion of Appropriate and Prompt Processing of Applications

In July 2010, in order to stabilize as quickly as possible the legal status of those foreign nationals who ought to be recognized as refugees, the Immigration Bureau set six months as the standard time for the processing of one refugee application and aimed to achieve by the end of March 2011 the processing of all applications, in principle, within this timeframe. In addition, the Immigration Bureau made the decision to announce on a quarterly basis the average processing (examination) time for refugee applications on the Ministry of Justice website.

In addition, following a proposal received from the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA) to establish a data center for information on the countries of origin of the refugees and to provide better materials to enable applicants to be able to browse and use them, the Immigration Bureau has been posting information concerning the countries of origin of the refugees and international affairs (specifically, Japanese translations of reports of the United Kingdom Home Office and the United States Department of State) on the Ministry of Justice website since November 2010, and endeavors to collect and prepare basic materials for information on the countries of origin.

Furthermore, the Immigration Bureau has been conducting enhanced training with the cooperation of the UNHCR for the purpose of training refugee inquirers with advanced knowledge and research capabilities. As well as the usual refugee inquirer training, the Immigration Bureau has also been implementing additional training on an ongoing basis such as a three-day practical training program using case studies since FY 2010 under the direction of the UNHCR, short-term officer dispatch to the UNHCR regional offices since FY 2011, and sending officers to participate in training at the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in Sanremo, Italy since FY 2012.

Further, since there has been a rapid increase in the number of applications (see Part 1, Chapter 6, Section 1) in recent years, measures are being taken to revise the system of refugee recognition aiming for more appropriate and prompt processing of cases. Discussions were held by the Expert Meeting on the Refugee Recognition System established under the 6th Immigration Policy Discussion Panel on revision of the refugee recognition system for more than a year from FY 2013, and a report compiling the results of the discussions was submitted to the Minister of Justice in December 2014. In the future, pursuant to the Basic Plan for Immigration Control (5th Edition) which was formulated based on the contents of the report, in order to ensure prompt and reliable asylum for refugees, revisions of the system of refugee recognition will be proactively carried out so as to clearly distinguish between those who are in genuine need of asylum and those who are not, and measures will be taken to ensure appropriate and prompt processing of cases corresponding to the contents of the case as well as measures to improve the quality of the examinations (see Part 1, Section 3, Subsection 7).

## Section 2 ☐ Acceptance of Refugees Through Resettlement

Resettlement is intended to transfer and resettle refugees, who have been evacuated from their countries of origins and who are temporarily taking shelter in a refugee camp in a neighboring country or some other place, to another country which agrees to accept such refugees from the countries where they were