UN representative urges Japan to accept refugees

TOKYO, Feb 8 (Reuters) Japan must accept more asylum-seekers if it wants to win a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, the UN refugee agency's new representative in the country said today.

Japan, the second-largest contributor to UN coffers, has campaigned without success for a re-organisation of the UN Security Council to give it a permanent seat alongside China, Russia, France, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

''There is an international sense of disappointment that Japan, which is peaceful and economically powerful, does not accept more refugees,'' Saburo Takizawa told reporters.

Japan allowed about 1,300 of 4,000 asylum applicants to stay in 2005 as refugees or otherwise. In comparison, 31 per cent of almost 60,000 asylum seekers in the United Kingdom were allowed to remain in the same period.

''If it wants a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Japan must improve its system for accepting refugees to international standards, or even higher,'' he added.

Takizawa, a former Justice Ministry official, last month became the first Japanese selected to represent the refugee agency in Tokyo.

He said he wanted to start by putting pressure on the government to consider accepting more refugees from Asia,including from Myanmar, public broadcaster NHK said on its Web site.

The overall number of foreign residents in Japan has risen to more than two million, or 1.57 percent of the population.

Some Japanese fear an influx of outsiders would mean rising crime rates in a country that prides itself on safety.

But police figures showed there were 40,126 suspected crimes by foreigners in 2006, down 16.2 percent on the previous year, Kyodo news agency said today.

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