Category: North Korean refugee

North Korean defectors to appear at UN Geneva Human Rights session

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To respond to attacks from North Korea’s Foreign Minister, who last week called defectors “scum,” a delegation is visiting Geneva to participate at the Human Rights Council on March 16-17.

The delegation is headed by well-known defector Mr. Ahn Myeong Cheol, a former prison guard in North Korean labor camps who witnessed first-hand the regime’s atrocities, who is now the executive director of the organization NK Watch. Ahn has testified to the UN Commission of Inquiry about his personal experiences relating to human rights violations in North Korea, and he will also respond to recent attacks against the report’s credibility.

Another issue that the defectors will raise is that of the North Korean overseas workers, whose situation is a form of modern-day slavery. A former overseas worker will also be present and present his testimony.

[UN Watch]

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Bios of North Korean defectors attending UN Human Rights session in Geneva

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Ahn Myeong Cheol was a prison guard in the North Korean regime’s brutal gulag, who escaped to South Korea and became a human rights activist. Born in North Hamgyong Province in North Korea, he was the only one chosen in his district, at age 18, to become a political prison camp guard. Throughout his service, Ahn was subjected to heavy brain-washing into believing that political prisoners were enemies of the state unworthy of sympathy. He worked for a total of eight years in four different camps. These camps were all designated as total control zones, which prohibit the release of prisoners under any circumstances. Since his escape, Ahn has become a North Korean human rights activist. He has provided testimony at the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK and is now the executive director of the organization NK Watch.

Gim Gyumin was born in Hwanghae Province in North Korea in 1974. In North Korea, he witnessed many human rights violations such as public executions, arbitrary detention, sexual violations, famine, etc. He fled North Korea in 1999 but was arrested in China and repatriated to North Korea. He escaped from North Korea again in 2000 and finally entered South Korea in 2001. In South Korea, he majored drama and film in Hanyang University and started his career as a film director. He directed many films about North Korean human rights. Since he is an eye-witness and victim of human rights violations in North Korea, he has integrated these real tragedies into his movies.

Mr. Kim was dispatched to Russia as a North Korean overseas worker in 2000. While he was working at the logging site in Russia, he received only $130 as a monthly salary since the North Korean government took almost 95% of his salary for the state fund to strengthen the dictatorship. He worked every day from 8am to 12am or even to 3am without having any breaks or rest. The only holiday he could have was the New Year’s Day. Since he could not endure this inhuman treatment by the North Korean authorities any more, he escaped the work site in 2002 and finally entered South Korea in 2013.

[UN Watch]

North Korean military, even Special Forces, suffering hunger

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On March 10, 2015, The Washington Free Beacon reported that a defecting career officer from the North Korean People’s Army divulged that not only are the people starving, but the nation’s armed forces, including the elite Storm Corps Special Forces, also face food shortages that have been described as “severe.”

With his identity kept secret, the defector was described only as a career military officer in his 40s. According to the defector, “Kim Jong-un repeatedly states that he will improve the livelihood of ordinary people but nothing has really changed. There have been no concrete actions to improve the livelihood of the people, so people no longer trust Kim Jong-un’s words and statements.”

Reportedly an officer in the much feared Storm Corps, the defector did state that officers in the military are usually much better off nutrition-wise than the general civilian population, as well as the lower ranks. The junior enlisted troops are reportedly “limited to meals of ‘corn rice’—ground corn fashioned into kernels of rice. … So some soldiers try to escape the military. Some steal food just to live.”

Painting an even bleaker picture, the officer added, “The food shortages are so severe soldiers cannot live on the rations provided by the military and must go outside of bases and steal food to survive.”

The lack of availability of food for the common people of the North is to such a degree that, according to South Korea’s JoongAng Daily, the growth of children in the North is stunted by decades worth of starvation. The Pyongyang government recently lowered the height requirement to be conscripted into the army to 4′ 7″ (142 centimeters). That’s the same height as the average American child at the age of 10 years, 3 months old, the average 4th Grader. Most North Korean teenage boys are less than 5 feet tall and weigh less than 100 pounds. In contrast, the average 17-year-old South Korean boy is 5-feet-8, only slightly shorter than an American boy of the same age.

[Examiner]

US, China, South Korea should prepare for North Korea’s collapse, American ex-envoy says

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Former U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill said he doesn’t know when or how the demise of the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will come about, but he believes it is inevitable. When it happens, he said, “we need to make sure that China, [South Korea] and the U.S. all understand what we’re going to do.”

Mr. Hill spoke Wednesday at a regional security conference hosted by The Washington Times in Seoul, where officials from the South Korean government office for reunification say they are pursuing small steps and confidence-building measures with North Korea.

Relations between the two Koreas occur mainly through the joint Kaesong Industrial Complex, which is inside the demilitarized zone that has divided the two nations for more than 60 years. Lee Duk-haeng, a senior policy officer in the ministry, said, “Our view is that if we reconnect the ecosystem between the two Koreas, it will channel into peaceful exchanges.”

Kim Jong Un has made overtures in recent months suggesting an openness for diplomatic engagement with Seoul, but he has spent much of the past three years threatening the South militarily.

Mr. Hill said that Washington and Seoul should be finding ways to convince Beijing that its support of North Korea is a barrier to wider international integration. He also said efforts should be made to draw Japan into the conversation as well.

For some, the comments felt like a throwback to the late 2000s. As U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs at the time, Mr. Hill headed the Obama administration’s first effort to breathe life into stalled six-party talks aimed at steering North Korea away from developing nuclear weapons. The effort foundered in 2009 when Pyongyang carried out an underground nuclear test, defying warnings from the international community.

[Read more of this Washington Times article]

North Korea denounces UN criticism of its human rights record

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North Korea’s foreign minister on Tuesday denounced criticism of Pyongyang’s human rights record, dismissing a U.N. report that concluded crimes against humanity were committed there and telling the top U.N. rights body that the United States is engaged in a “human rights racket.”

Last year’s report by a panel of U.N. experts detailed abuses including mass starvation and forced abortions. The panel, which interviewed hundreds of defectors, recommended that North Korea’s human rights situation be referred to the International Criminal Court.

The panel also sent a letter to leader Kim Jong Un warning he could be held accountable.

Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva that “hostile forces are only interested to hear from such scum of mankind as the so-called defectors.”

“The act of cooking up the report of the commission of inquiry based on lies of a few such criminals is itself a misdeed which is completely against the aspiration of the U.N. for civilization and rule of law,” Ri said.

Pursuing human rights issues “is the stereotyped method of the U.S. … to smear the countries disobedient to it,” Ri asserted, adding that Washington has “started to desperately cling to the anti-(North Korea) human rights racket, particularly since the last year.”

Earlier Tuesday, Ri told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that annual U.S.-South Korean military drills launched this week “are unprecedentedly provocative in nature and have especially high possibility of sparking off a war.” The allies say the drills are purely defensive.

[AP]

North Korean diplomat to address UN Rights Council

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A South Korean Foreign Ministry official said Tuesday that North Korea would dispatch its top diplomat to a high-level U.N. human rights meeting next week, in an apparent attempt to counter international criticism of the country’s human rights record.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong

The South Korean official, who asked not to be identified, told the VOA Korean service that North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong was expected to speak at the meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which will convene March 2 in Geneva.

Ri would be the first North Korean foreign minister to address the council.

Recently, Pyongyang launched an aggressive campaign to cope with mounting international pressure over its treatment of its citizens. The call for improving human rights conditions in the communist country was prompted by a damning report by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI), which accused North Korea of committing crimes again humanity.

Some analysts in Seoul say Pyongyang is likely to attempt to discredit the report and accuse Seoul of abusing human rights by attacking South Korea’s National Security Law. That 1948 law bans praise or support for North Korea. International human rights groups often have accused the South Korean government of using the law to suppress freedom of expression.

“They will repeat the regime’s argument that the COI report is based on fabricated information and will likely say the South Korean government is infringing upon its citizens’ human rights with the implementation of the National Security Law,” said Kim Soo-am, a North Korea expert at the Korean Institute for National Unification, South Korea’s state-run research institute.

[VoA]

Let’s not lose sight of North Korea’s human rights record

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Rarely does a United Nations investigation produce such clarity and impact as did the Commission of Inquiry on human rights violations in North Korea. The report, issued a year ago, documented the existence of political concentration camps in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and a regime that has treated its people with sickening brutality.

But now what? What can be done to get concrete help for the victims? There is a danger that as other pressing concerns about North Korea accumulate — nuclear weapons, missiles, cyberattacks — the world will lose interest in the human rights disaster.

One of the most prominent witnesses to the depravity of the North, Shin Dong-hyuk, recently changed some elements in his account. The changes do not undermine the larger conclusions of the U.N. commission, which received public testimony from some 80 witnesses.

The U.N. commission, chaired by Michael Kirby, a former justice of the High Court of Australia, found that North Korea’s leaders should be held accountable for the abuses and recommended referral to the International Criminal Court for investigation of crimes against humanity. However, veto threats by Russia or China are real, and a referral is not going to happen, at least not now.

Much work remains to be done. A key step is to provide adequate financial resources for the U.N. office of the special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, Indonesian lawyer Marzuki Darusman. A related and significant initiative, just starting, is the establishment of an office by the United Nations in South Korea that will continue to investigate human rights abuses in North Korea, with an eye toward identifying who in the regime’s leadership is responsible for the horrors so that they can eventually be held to account — and so that current officials may think twice before becoming complicit in an ongoing crime against humanity.

[From a Washington Post editorial]

North Korean defectors speak at Boston University

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Three North Korean defectors spoke Monday about their escape from the socialist country and their transition into their new lives at a panel hosted by Boston University’s Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) student group.

Gwangsung Jung, one of the defectors, said it was difficult adjusting to a different life after escaping North Korea in 2006, but he is grateful for the opportunities he has had since. “You have to remember that I was brainwashed for a big part of my life, so I had to start studying everything from zero,” he said during the panel. “The hardest part was learning English because in North Korea, we were taught that Americans were the enemy.”

Eunju Kim (left) and Gwangsung Jung answer audience questions at Boston University

Sejun Park, another defector, said poverty is a serious problem in North Korea and contributes to citizens’ isolation. “Koreans live isolated from any type of information entry,” he said on the panel. “They are completely controlled and have no form of comparing their lives to other countries. Therefore, they do not know about human rights.”

Eunju Kim, the final panelist and defector, said as a former student in the North Korean education system, she was subjugated to watch severe acts of violence, such as public executions. “When you are watching the public execution, … it was part of the education in North Korea,” she said on the panel. “During the long famine, there was no humanity left to people in North Korea. My father’s friend, he stole food from my father’s funeral.”

[Daily Free Press]

US Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights to Indonesia

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Ambassador Robert King, Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, will travel to Indonesia February 23-27 for meetings with senior officials to discuss the deplorable human rights situation in North Korea.

Ambassador King will meet with senior Indonesian government officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, members of the People’s Representative Council, and civil society members.

This visit underscores the U.S. commitment to work closely with the international community to sustain international attention on the deplorable human rights situation in North Korea.

[US Depart of State]

North Koreans toil in slave-like conditions abroad

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Around the globe, tens of thousands of North Koreans work long hours for little or no pay, toiling in Chinese factories or Russian logging camps, digging military tunnels in Myanmar, building monuments for African dictators, or sweating at construction sites in the Middle East and aboard fishing boats off Fiji, according to former workers and human rights researchers.

For decades, North Korea has been accused of sending contract workers abroad and confiscating most of their wages to support its leadership. But in the years since Kim Jong-un took over as leader, human rights researchers say, the program has expanded rapidly as international sanctions have squeezed the country’s other sources of badly needed foreign currency, like illicit trading in missile parts.

A 2012 study by the North Korea Strategy Center, a defector group in Seoul, and the private Korea Policy Research Center estimated that 60,000 to 65,000 North Koreans were working in over 40 countries worldwide, providing the state with $150 million to $230 million a year. That number has since grown to 100,000, human rights researchers said.

“North Korea is exploiting their labor and salaries to fatten the private coffers of Kim Jong-un,” said Ahn Myeong-chul, head of NK Watch, a human rights group in Seoul that is campaigning for a United Nations investigation into the practice. “We suspect that Kim is using some of the money to buy luxury goods for his elite followers and finance the recent building boom in Pyongyang that he has launched to show off his leadership.”

“Earnings are not sent back as remittances, but appropriated by the state and transferred back to the country in the form of bulk cash,” the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies said, noting that United Nations sanctions ban the transfer of bulk cash to the Pyongyang government. “Returning workers also act as mules to carry hard currency earnings back to North Korea.”

NK Watch has collected the testimony of 13 former North Korean contract workers, now living in South Korea, in support of a petition to the United Nations asking for an investigation into what it calls “state-sponsored slavery.” The petition, to be filed next month to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on contemporary slavery, said the migrants worked a minimum of 12 hours a day, were given a full day off only a few times a year, and received only a small portion, commonly 10 percent, of their promised pay, or none at all.

One worker told NK Watch that he received only $160 in the three years he worked in a Siberian logging camp in the 1990s, toiling up to 21 hours a day in temperatures often below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. He was told the rest of his wages were sent home to his family. But families were given only coupons for state-owned stores, which often had nothing to buy, former workers said.

[Read full New York Times article]