Category: Prison Camps

American student held in North Korea goes six months without consular access

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An American man sentenced to 15 years hard labor in North Korea for attempting to steal a propaganda poster has not been permitted consular access in nearly six months, the U.S. State Department confirmed Wednesday.

Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old college student at the University of Virginia, was detained in January as he prepared to leave North Korea at the end of a tour. He was sentenced in March for swiping the poster and for other unspecified “crimes against the state.” Washington has criticized the sentence as “unduly harsh.”

In a statement, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said that an official from the Swedish Embassy, which represents American interests in the country, last visited Warmbier nearly six months ago. “Even when requested by the Swedish Embassy, … the DPRK still routinely delays or denies consular access to U.S. citizens,” the statement, released Tuesday, said. “Representatives from the Swedish Embassy have not been granted consular access to Mr. Warmbier since the visit on March 2.”

“Three months without consular access is a violation of the right to equality before the law,” Arnold Fang, a Hong Kong-based researcher with Amnesty International said. “Despite official claims that U.S. citizens arrested in the DPRK are not used for political purposes, it’s increasingly clear from its very public treatment of these cases that the DPRK does just that,” he said.

[Japan Times]

Rights Group builds legal case against Pyongyang abusers

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A human rights group is beginning to build the case for the eventual prosecution of Kim Jong Un and other North Korean leaders for crimes against humanity by detailing information about thousands of individuals who have been sent to political prison camps.

The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) has published a list of political prison detainees, staff and victims of enforced disappearance, including names, dates of incarceration, alleged crimes and the locations of camps still in operation.

“By providing specific information on individual perpetrators we can show them that they are responsible for their actions in the event of an opening up in North Korea,” said Kim In-sung, a researcher at NKDB.

The catalogue was based on surveys and interviews with more than 1,000 North Korean defectors. It is intended to provide further evidence to support the 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry investigative report documenting a network of political prison camps in the country and widespread atrocities, comparable to what the Nazis did before and during World War II.

[VoA]

Former Kim bodyguard describes North Korean prison camp

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Dozens of purple scars crisscross Lee Young-guk’s lower legs. He says many are the result of beatings endured while imprisoned in Yoduk, North Korea’s most notorious prison camp. Removing his dentures, Lee shows just five or six original teeth, wonky and cracked; the only ones he has left after countless punches to the head. Being hit with the butt of a rifle, he says, left him blind in one eye.

Lee was the bodyguard to Kim Jong Il for more than 10 years. A once loyal servant of the regime, Lee says he left Kim’s employment without issues. While trying to defect to South Korea, he thrown into the infamously brutal Yodok political camp.

“If you are a political prisoner, Yodok’s main goal is to kill you,” he says. He remembers when he first arrived seeing inmates who looked like walking skeletons. “It was tough enough that they barely fed me,” he says. “What was worse was they kept on beating me, and they executed people once a week, which we were forced to watch. You have to be mentally strong, then the cycle repeats itself.”

In the five years between being arrested in China and his release for good behavior, Lee says he lost almost half his body weight. He says inmates were so weak from the lack of food, they were rarely able to life their heads unless ordered to do so by guards. If they were unable to complete their physical work for the day, Lee says they weren’t fed.

[CNN]

North Korea attempting to ban the crucifix?

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Britain’s Daily Express reports that North Korean government officials are confiscating items with crosses on labels and raiding shops for the markings. Clothing and hair clips are amongst items being inspected by Kim Jong-un’s regime which is opposed to organized religion.

It’s believed there are 300,000 Christians in North Korea. Many are forced to worship in secret and risk torture and death to do so. Under the country’s strict class system Christians are classed as “hostiles” receiving less food and harsher punishments.

A spokesman for Open Doors said: “Despite Christianity being strictly forbidden Open Doors estimates there are 200,000 – 400,000 Christians who worship in secret inside North Korea.

Kim Jong-un’s despotic regime is said to reserve its harshest punishments for Christians, with believers facing arrest, torture, imprisonment and death. It’s estimated 70,000 Christians are currently in prison or labor camps in North Korea because of their faith.

Defectors claim four church buildings in the capital of Pyongyang are used as showpieces by the authorities.

[Daily Express]

How big of a threat is North Korea?

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Under the leadership of 33-year-old Kim Jong Un, who came to power upon his father’s death in 2011, the pace of North Korean nuclear and missile tests has accelerated dramatically. His tyrannical regime now has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads — and is adding a new weapon to that stockpile every six weeks or so, experts believe.

North Korea has already successfully mounted a small nuclear warhead on a 1,500 km–range Rodong missile that can reach South Korea and Japan — and is on course to develop 13,000 km–range intercontinental ballistic missiles targeting the continental U.S. by early next decade, according to observers at Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. ignores North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal — and the instability of its erratic leader — at its peril, says Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Just because Pyongyang wants us to pay attention,” Fitzpatrick told The Economist, “that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.”

The U.N. Security Council has just passed the toughest sanctions in two decades. However, the success of the sanctions will depend almost entirely on China — Pyongyang’s most influential ally, and the nation with which it does 90 percent of its trade. If the North Korean regime collapses, experts agree, there will be absolute chaos. There would be widespread looting by the country’s starving citizens, and violence in the gulags holding the country’s 120,000 political prisoners. Millions of people would rush the border into China, and South Korean and U.S. troops would be forced to occupy a devastated and dysfunctional country.

In his final days, Kim might choose to pass the nuclear weapons under his control to terrorists — or even launch them himself, as a final act of suicidal revenge. The regime’s collapse would probably spark a brutal civil war with very high stakes, says North Korea expert Andrei Lankov — like “Syria with nukes.”

[The Week]

North Korean defectors file petition on behalf of imprisoned families

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North Korean defectors have filed a petition in a South Korean court, requesting protection for imprisoned family members in the North.

Choi Hyun-joon, a defector and founder of activist group Unification Future Solidarity, submitted a petition to Seoul’s Central District Court, filed on behalf of six defectors in the South who have 20 family members in North Korean prison camps.

According to the defectors, the South Korean constitution recognizes North Korea as part of South Korean territory, and North Koreans are recognized as South Korean citizens. And their human rights need to be protected, the activists say.

North Korea is sensitive to international criticism of its human rights record and has called statements on the country’s political prison camps, forced labor and summary executions “outright lies.”

[UPI]

North Korea says it will treat U.S. detainees under ‘wartime law’

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North Korea said on Monday it has told the United States it will sever the only channel of communication between them, at the United Nations in New York, after Washington blacklisted leader Kim Jong Un last week for human rights abuses.

All matters related to the United States, including the handling of American citizens detained by Pyongyang, will be conducted under its “wartime law,” the North’s official KCNA news agency said.

Two Americans known to be detained in North Korea include Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in March for trying to steal an item with a propaganda slogan, according to North Korean state media. The other, Korean-American Kim Dong Chul, is serving a 10 year sentence for espionage, state media said.

The move is the latest escalation of tension with the isolated country, which earlier on Monday threatened a “physical response” after the United States and South Korea said they would deploy the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea.

Pyongyang  said, “The Republic will handle all matters arising between us and the United States from now on under our wartime laws, and the matters of Americans detained are no exception to this.” It was not clear how “wartime laws” would affect the handling of the two Americans detained. But North Korea has indicated in the past that wartime laws would mean that detainees will not be released on humanitarian grounds.

The North and the United States remain technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean War, in which Washington sided with the South, ended only with a truce.

[Reuters]

US sanctions North Korean leader Kim Jong Un

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The Obama administration today slapped sanctions on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and 10 other regime officials for their alleged complicity in human rights abuses against the North Korean people.

The move marked the first time Washington sanctioned Kim Jong Un personally. Administration officials said Kim was “ultimately responsible” for what they called “North Korea’s notorious abuses of human rights.”

“Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam J. Szubin said in a statement announcing the new action.

“As a result of today’s actions, any property or interest in property of those designated by (Office of Foreign Assets Control) within U.S. jurisdiction is frozen,” the Treasury Department said. “Additionally, transactions by U.S. persons involving the designated persons are generally prohibited.”

The sanctions also extend to five North Korean state entities, including the Ministry of People’s Security, which the report says oversees labor camps and other detention facilities, where torture, execution, rape, starvation and forced labor takes place.

U.S. officials briefing reporters on the new actions say they expected the sanctions to have “a worldwide ripple effect” making it harder for those on the list to do business with global financial institutions.

[CNN]

North Korea reacts to publicity generated by ex-captive Kenneth Bae

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North Korea has a message for former captive Kenneth Bae: Stop talking, or else U.S. prisoners in Pyongyang’s custody won’t be released.

State-controlled news agency KCNA said Monday that North Korea will “neither make any compromise nor conduct negotiations” with the United States as long as Bae keeps “jabbering” about his term of imprisonment, Yonhap reported.

“American criminals now in custody in [North Korea] will never be able to go back to the U.S.,” KCNA added.

North Korea has in custody two U.S. citizens: University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier and Kim Dong Chul, a resident of Fairfax, Va.

Bae, a U.S. missionary who was arrested in 2012 and released in 2014, had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea on charges of carrying out religious activities. The imprisonment took a heavy toll on Bae’s health, and he was hospitalized three times for diabetes, an enlarged heart and back pain. Bae recently published a memoir and has been interviewed by several U.S. television networks.

[UPI]

And what of Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim still in North Korean prison?

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Canadian citizen Hyeon Soo Lim was convicted in December of plotting to overthrow the North Korean government, and since then has languished in a hard labor camp. The 62-year-old senior pastor of the Toronto-area Light Korean Presbyterian Church has lost weight and is slower in his responses.

Ottawa says it is doing everything in its power to get Lim out of prison and in the interest of his case, it won’t divulge many details on its exact efforts to make that happen. Canadian consular officials have visited him twice in Pyongyang where he is serving a life sentence.

But frustration is growing among Canadians tracking the case who say Ottawa is “too silent,” and should take the initiative and engage and pressure North Korea more directly on setting Lim free. What’s necessary, said several people contacted by CBC News, is a well-tested U.S.-style intervention that combines contact and pressure.

“It’s clear as day what needs to be done,” said the Canadian source. “The prime minister has to write a letter to the chairman [North Korean leader Kim Jong-un] requesting release or pardon.” A higher-level emissary could also travel to Pyongyang to negotiate with the leadership there, said the source.

American missionary Kenneth Bae, who was convicted of subversion in North Korea, is also advising that Ottawa do more. He is in Toronto this week to raise the profile of Lim’s case. “[The North Koreans] want some sort of gesture from the Canadian government to save their face. They need an excuse to let him go.”

Lim appeared in an interview with CNN earlier this year. Bae says allowing the interview was a clear signal to Ottawa that they were willing to negotiate.

[CBC]