Japan may ratify an international treaty next year under which foreign inmates would be repatriated to serve out their prison terms at home, government officials said Thursday.

The Justice Ministry's Correction Bureau told officials at other bureaus Wednesday it plans to submit a proposal on ratifying the Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons to the Diet during the 150-day session scheduled to begin in January, they said.

The bureau plans to formulate the proposal and bills outlining the necessary domestic measures, including transfer procedures, by February.

Forty-nine countries have joined the pact, which was concluded in 1983 and took effect in 1985.

The treaty would allow Japan to transfer foreign inmates to their home countries and vice versa if both countries as well as the inmate agree, and if there is a term of six months or more left to be served.

Japanese prisons held 3,237 foreign inmates as of the end of 2000.

People-smuggling up

The number of illegal immigrants caught being smuggled into Japan rose more than fourfold this year over the previous year, reversing a downward trend since a peak in 1997, the government said Thursday.

In a report on human trafficking, the National Police Agency says smugglers are not only using cargo containers for their operations but are resorting to large fishing vessels, sneaking dozens of illegal immigrants to Japan at a time.

According to government figures, the number of smuggling cases detected by the police and the coast guard totaled 43 this year through Dec. 23, up from 19 in the same period last year.

The number of illegal immigrants who were caught totaled 419, a 4.3-fold increase from last year.

The NPA says 333 of the illegal immigrants were Chinese, accounting for nearly 80 percent of the total. Ninety-six percent of the illegal Chinese immigrants came from Fujian Province.

The NPA report says the pattern of people-smuggling from China changed in the second half of the year as smugglers increasingly used big fishing vessels.

Small-scale smuggling via cargo containers was more prominent in the first half of the year, the report says. While the container smugglers typically used Dalian and Tianjin in northern China as smuggling ports, the fishing boats mainly sailed out from Shanghai and Zhejiang provinces.

The NPA said Chinese smuggling through South Korea also became prominent this year, with the number of cases detected by police and the coast guard rising from only three in 2000 to 11 this year. The number of illegal immigrants detained shot up to 75 from 13.

The NPA said smugglers typically pay sailors in Pusan to hide Chinese immigrants on board their ships and smuggle them to Japan.