A ruling party lawmaker on Thursday proposed a bill that would ban the physical detention of foreign nationals under the age of 18 awaiting deportation.

As of 2016, nearly 200 foreigners under 18 -- whose parents are mostly unregistered migrant workers -- are being held at detention facilities, which human rights activists describe as “prison-like.”

Drafted by Rep. Keum Tae-sup of the Democratic Party of Korea, the bill intends to revise the Immigration Control Act to end such practices. Twelve other lawmakers have signed it.

“The lawmakers believe it is necessary to limit long-term detention of foreigners, which is unconstitutional,” Rep. Keum‘s office said through a spokesperson.

“The bill is also to (make South Korea) live up to global standards, which support a ban on detaining children.”

It marks the first effort by any mainstream South Korean politician to address persistent demands by civic groups here and abroad to better protect the basic rights of the prospective deportees.

Under the current law, foreigners facing eviction for visa violations and other reasons are held in detention facilities, regardless of their age, until they are sent to their home countries. There is no clause stipulating how long authorities can detain them.

The revision would put a limit on the length of confinement to six months extendable by another six months and forbid the detention of children except in unavoidable cases.

Migrant children facing deportation will instead be sent to child welfare facilities and be allowed to meet their parents on a regular basis. Those foreign minors detained in exceptional cases will be given access to education, food and medical services.

According to the Justice Ministry, the number of minors held at detention facilities was 197 as of 2016, an increase of 3 1/2 times from 56 in 2012. The number of adults at the facilities stood at 29,926 last year.

Experts and rights campaigners have long taken issue with the violation of human rights taking place at detention facilities for foreigners. For young minors, the situation could be even more traumatic.

“Inside the detention facilities, detainees lack nutritious food and medicine. They are only allowed to exercise twice a week, only for like 20 minutes,” Go Ji-woon, a human rights lawyer for Gamdong, told The Korea Herald. “Being behind bars itself is traumatic for minors.”

“The biggest reason migrant children shouldn’t be detained is that they are not criminals,” she said. “Most of the foreign minors are locked there because their parents could not register them with the government because of their unregistered status.”

Kim Jong-chul, who has offered legal assistance to a slew of unregistered migrant children, welcomed the bill, expressing hope for its rapid passage.

“For children, those detained even for a short period show symptoms such as social phobia, bed-wetting and having nightmares even after they are released,” he said.

“The bill addresses the most serious problems related to the detention of migrants, so I hope it can pass the Assembly soon.”

Under the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by 196 nations, states cannot justify detaining children on the basis that their parents need to be detained and that it is the only way to keep the family together.

A similar bill to protect unregistered migrant children -- who are excluded from basic social services such as education and medical services due to their parent’s illegal status -- was presented to the parliament by Filipino-Korean lawmaker Jasmin Lee in 2014. It was shelved without receiving much attention at the parliament.

In March last year, a 2-year-old child from Liberia was detained along with a 5-year-old sibling and their mother. The family’s unregistered stay here was discovered after a metro station worker stopped them, mistaking them for not paying, and sent them to the police.

They were released a few weeks later and the mother is now seeking asylum here, according to the lawyer Kim.

More recently, an 18-year-old Nigerian was released earlier this month after a 50-day stay at a detention facility in Cheongju. Some 1,650 people filed a petition against the detention facility for locking up a minor just because of his mother‘s unregistered status.

By Ock Hyun-ju (laeticia.ock@heraldcorp.com)