North Korea’s record on human trafficking top focus of House hearing

The soon-to-be-released U.S. State Department’s 2016 trafficking report will be the topic of a hearing planned by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, Chairman of the House congressional panel that oversees global human rights issues. Smith is the author of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a law which mandates the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report.

“Get It Right This Time: A Victims-Centered Trafficking in Persons Report,” is the title of the hearing to be held before the House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee on global human rights.

[Christian Newswire] 

Harrowing reality of North Korean labor camps

Korean citizens who have survived the ordeal of North Korean political prison camps and escaped the regime emerge with harrowing tales of the compatriots and family members who didn’t make it – most killed off by the cruel combination of prolonged near-starvation and slavish forced labor.

“Conditions are horrific. People are worked for 14, 15 or 16 hours every day with just a handful of corn to live on and they are intentionally starved and worked to death,” said Suzanne Scholte, chairman of the North Korea freedom coalition, a group of organizations based in Washington DC assisting defectors and campaigning for improved human rights. “Torture is common, there is no medical aid and the sanitation is horrible. They wear the torn uniforms of old prisoners and sleep crammed together in a room.”

North Korea denies the existence of vast political prison camps, but according to a 2014 UN special commission report, a combination of satellite imagery and extensive human testimony proves they are still in operation and are used to perpetrate “unspeakable atrocities” on hapless citizens, who simply disappear with no word to their families even if they subsequently die in detention.

The UN reported systematic starvation, torture, rape and many executions at such camps, which hold an estimated total of 80,000 to 120,000 prisoners in the most wretched conditions.  “The commission estimates that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in these camps over the past five decades,” the report said.

A 2009 legal report from South Korea cited prisoners being fed starvation rations of a few ounces of rotten corn and some kind of thin “salt soup”. “They lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist … they live and die in rags, without soap, socks or underwear,” the Washington Post reported at the time.

Former prisoners sentenced to just 18 months hard labor recalled fellow inmates not surviving amid the constant beatings and malnutrition. They often work in the fields, logging in forests, down mines with no safety measures or crude factories where injuries are rampant, Scholte said.

And in another account, a man who was arrested as a teenager trying to sneak out of North Korea, Hyuk Kim, recalled subsisting at a lower-level labor camp by catching rats, drying them out and eating the flesh raw. “If you tried to cook the rats, the guards would smell the meat or fire, catch you and beat you mercilessly,” the 33-year-old defector later said.

 [The Guardian]

For North Korean refugees, Russia is the purgatory to North Korea’s hell

In 2008, Ryu En Nam, a North Korean defector, was extradited from Russia and executed. He was tied to the train going back to North Korea.

“It was horrible. The train started moving and for as long as he could, Ryu En Nam ran with it,” human rights lawyer Lubov Tataretz said, a few years after she tried and failed to prevent Ryu En Nam’s extradition.

Under a recently-signed treaty, the few asylum seekers who manage to escape the hermit kingdom and make it to Russia will be forcibly repatriated, to a country where prison inmates have to burn bodies of those who starve to death and use the remains as fertilizer.

Many of the North Koreans who defect to Russia do so after being exported by their motherland to work as construction workers or lumberjacks in Russia’s far east.

Russia’s Federal Migration Service’s past treatment of North Korea refugees is not encouraging: Over the past decade, 200 North Koreans applied for Russian refugee status. Only two were successful.

[Gawker.com]

North Korean defector appeals to Russia for refugee status for 4th time

Currently, Russia’s Federal Migration Service (or FMS) is reviewing a North Korean defector’s application for refugee status for the fourth and final time. The media calls him “Kim,” and he has lived in Russia since 2013.

Kim first crossed the river from North Korea to China when he was 17. It was 1997, there was a famine going on, and his boarding school had just closed down because it couldn’t feed its students. He lived illegally for eight years in China, until Chinese officials caught him trying to travel to Russia and quickly deported him back to North Korea. North Korean defectors don’t have a shot at asylum in China, where they are regarded as no more than economic migrants.

As punishment for crossing the border without authorization, Kim was sent to a prison camp “for re-education.” At these camps, fifty prisoners sleep in one room on a floor without bedding. Kim told Civic Assistance he worked 20 hours a day. (It could have been much worse at a camp for political prisoners.)

One day, when sent to work outside the camp, he and 30 others took a chance and ran away. Three men, Kim included, successfully hid in the home of an acquaintance. The rest were caught and shot. Again, Kim crossed over the river into China. Again, he lived day-to-day in hiding, this time only for five years. He managed to cross the frozen Amur River into the Russian border city of Blagoveshchensk. He ran into some Russian border guards and told them he wanted to request refugee status. They responded by arresting him.

[Gawker.com]