Category: Prison Camps

Joint Letter to UN Security Council re North Korean human rights

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Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a number of other co-signers * are urging the UN Security Council to hold another formal session, prior to the end of 2015, on the human rights situation in North Korea.

Excerpts of the letter:
As you know, the UN Human Rights Council-mandated Commission of Inquiry on the human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) concluded that “the long-standing and ongoing patterns of systematic and widespread violations” of human rights in the DPRK “meet the high threshold for proof of crimes against humanity.” The commission found that the nature, scale, and gravity of these abuses “reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

The commission concluded that the DPRK’s ongoing “open defiance of the United Nations makes this a case where decisive, yet carefully targeted action should be taken by the Security Council in support of the ongoing efforts of the remainder of the United Nations system.”

The human rights situation in the DPRK remains dire. In his most recent report to the UN General Assembly, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK concluded that “grave violations continue to be committed on a large scale and particularly affect the most vulnerable groups.” The Special Rapporteur further called on the international community to “step up efforts to protect the population” of the DPRK and “hold the government accountable for those gross violations.”

In our view, it is critical that the UN Security Council hold another formal session on the situation in the DPRK this year. International pressure remains a critical avenue to press the DPRK to change. It is no coincidence that last year’s unprecedented engagement by the DPRK at the UN Human Rights Council and at the UN General Assembly followed concerted international attention to its human rights record.

[Co-signors include Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (NKHR), Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea (ICNK), International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights]

November 1 International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church

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Last year was the worst year for persecuted Christians in contemporary history; beatings, rapes, kidnappings and killings all increased. To let persecuted Christians know they are not forgotten and to educate Americans about persecution, Open Doors USA is turning to technology to reach into homes and churches across the nation via the ministry’s second live webcast.

During the live webcast, Open Doors USA will provide expert commentary and give viewers the chance to ask questions of persecuted Christians from Iraq and Kenya through a live chat. There will also be a rare interview with a North Korean woman who spent several years in a prison camp because of her faith.

[Christian News Wire]

North Korea frees New York University student

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Won Moon Joo in Pyongyang Sept 2015

North Korea on Monday freed a South Korean national who is a student at New York University.

North Korean state media said it “deported” Won Moon Joo, 21, at the border village of Panmunjom as a “humanitarian” measure about six months after he had been arrested for crossing the Chinese border into North Korea. It didn’t elaborate.

South Korean officials confirmed Joo’s repatriation. The National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s main spy agency, said it will investigate whether Joo violated the country’s anti-North Korean security law, which prohibits unapproved travel to the North.

Joo has permanent residency status in the United States. The exact motivation for his travel to North Korea wasn’t clear.

North Korea often uses detainees in attempts to win political concessions and aid from rivals Seoul and Washington, and a South Korean analyst said it may have calculated that since Joo’s alleged crime was relatively minor, his release might boost the impoverished, authoritarian country’s international image and lead to more investment and tourism.

Ten days ago, Joo was presented to the media in Pyongyang and said he had not been able to contact his family but wanted them to know he was healthy. For most of the 30-minute appearance, he read a prepared — and probably coached — speech praising the country, its government and people. Other foreigners who have been detained in North Korea have said after their release that they were coached closely on what to say in such statements.

Joo is one of four South Koreans known to be held in North Korea. The other three are accused of more serious espionage acts or attempts to establish underground Christian churches in the country.

[New York Post]

Grim fate for women repatriated to North Korea after forays into China

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North Korea has been detaining an increasing number of women in the past few years for crossing the border into China in search of food and opportunities to work for their families’ survival, according to a human rights report on the country’s gulag-style penal system issued Friday.

Authorities have been forcibly repatriating the women and jailing them in a network of political gulags, or kwan-li-so (labor camps) and kyo-hwa-so (political prisoner camps), according to the report issued by the nonprofit Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK). Once repatriated, women are subject to extreme privation and repression while in detention, the report said.

The report, titled “Hidden Gulag IV: Gender Repression & Hidden Disappearances,” is the fourth in a series of reports on arbitrary detentions and forced labor in North Korea issued by HRNK since 2003.

It cites the post-2007 expansion of the women’s section at labor camp No. 12 in Jongo-ri, North Hamgyong province, in the northernmost part of the country, to hold a large number of forcibly repatriated women from the province. Inside labor camp No. 12, young women detainees were forced to work as wig and eyelash makers, while older women performed heavy labor such as agricultural production, animal husbandry, tree felling and log cutting. Former prisoners said the facility housed more than 1,000 people.

Women who have been forcibly repatriated have been subject to systematic torture and beatings during interrogations, severe food deprivation, and naked strip searches and compulsory exercises to dislodge money or valuables hidden in inside their bodies, the report said. Those who were pregnant when they were repatriated have been forced to undergo abortions if authorities thought they were carrying babies fathered by Chinese men, it said.

North Korea has between 80,000 and 120,000 prisoners detained in political prison camps, or about one of every 200 citizens, according to a report issued in February 2014 by a United Nations Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea, which documented the network of such prisons and the atrocities that occur inside them.

[Radio Free Asia]

Meet Kim Heung kwang, former member of North Korean thought police

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By his third year working for Kim Jong-il’s thought police, Kim Heung-kwang says he could almost sense the presence of illegal data. Going door-to-door with the task force assigned to search out digital contraband in citizens’ homes, he remembers finding forbidden DVDs and players hidden under beds and in books with pages cut away to create hidden compartments.

Early on he found that when he knocked on doors, the guilty watchers would hurriedly hide their DVDs. So he learned to turn off the power to the entire building before making his house calls, trapping discs in their players. “I felt they were watching rotten, capitalist material and ruining the juche mentality,” Kim says, referring to the North Korean communist ideology. The short, bespectacled man, sitting in his austere Seoul office, smiles wearily and crosses his legs with a professorial air. “I felt justified to send these criminals away.”

The DVD owners would cry and plead. They’d beg on their knees and pull on the sleeves of his uniform, claiming they had just found the offending media lying in the street. Sometimes he accepted bribes and turned a blind eye. (“You could feel the outside of the envelope between your fingers and tell whether it was a lot of money,” he remembers.)

But most of the data criminals he caught, he reported. Many were sentenced to months or years in prison camps. Read more

North Korean thought policeman abdicates

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[A PC containing 400 files of films, TV shows, and ebooks] were what finally transformed Kim Heung kwang’s thinking. He remembers reading a Dale Carnegie self-help book and Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. But most influential was a history book about Middle Eastern dictators, including the stories of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, all friends of the Kim regime. “Reading about the crimes happening in these countries, I began to realize that those crimes were happening in my country too,” Kim says. “That was the starting point of the logic shifting in my brain. I began to understand the nature of dictatorship.”

In 2003 he was arrested and taken to a detention center; he’d been ratted out by one of the comrades with whom he’d shared his secret store. He says the police tortured him for a week, forcing him to write hundreds of pages of confession under hot lights and preventing him from sleeping by jabbing his forehead with a needle. After the year of drudgery at a reeducation farm, Kim was released and managed to bribe a border guard to help him escape across the Tumen. He made his way from China to Seoul, where he set up North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity.

Kim uses Chinese traders and smuggler contacts to smuggle contraband media into North Korea. The content on Kim’s drives are mostly short educational documentaries created by and starring Kim himself. He explains to North Koreans what democracy is, for instance, or simply shows them what a bookstore or the Internet looks like. “When a North Korean watches an action movie with a chase scene in a grocery store, they want to slow it down to see what’s on the shelves,” he says. “I show them what they want to see—what I wanted to see when I was there.”

Kim has also developed what he calls stealth USB drives, designed to avoid detection. To any casual observer, the drive seems empty. But its contents reappear with a simple trigger, the details of which Kim asked that I not publicize.

[Wired]

North Korean spokeman denies persecution of Christians

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When asked about the persecution of Christians inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a spokesman for the regime responded “absolutely false”.

Alejandro Cao — the Special Delegate of North Korea’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries — publically denied that Christians are being persecuted under Kim Jong Un’s communist regime.

But as many as 100,000 Christians are estimated to be held in North Korean labor camps where they are frequently subjected to torture and are even executed for their faith because the DPRK views Christianity as a threat to “Juche”: the regime’s official ideology that demands dependence on the absolute leadership of the ruling member of the Kim family.

[Worthy News]

North Korea marches captive Canadian pastor in front of cameras

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On Thursday, North Korea marched a Canadian Christian hostage out in front of cameras, so he could admit to crimes against the glorious State—specifically, the crime of placing God above the “Dear Leadership.”

NKNews.org reports that Reverend Hyeon-soo Lim, a Canadian citizen of South Korean birth, was arrested in January during a missionary visit to North Korea, read a statement confessing to “serious crimes,” including that he “severely slandered and impaired the supreme dignity and system of this country and perpetrated a scheme to overthrow the state.”

“In order to create the impression that it is God, and not the Worker’s Party and this country’s government which give things to eat and provide means to live we intentionally drew the cross and wrote the name of the church and Bible phrases on the sacks of provisions that were donated to several parts of the country such as Chongjin and Jagang Province,” said Lim.

“The purpose that I traveled about several parts of the country on the pretext of ‘aid’ was to build a base to overthrow the system of the country and create a religious state, taking advantage of the policies of the U.S. and and South Korean authorities,” Lim continued. “The basic purpose that I was so active in the (provision of) aid to this country in the past was to remove loyalty in the hearts of the North Korean people to their authorities. I deeply, deeply apologize from my heart for my heart, for my indescribable treason.”

Lim’s family, and his Light Presbyterian Church of Toronto, maintain that he has made over 100 trips to North Korea over the past 20 years out of “tremendous love for the people of the DPRK,” because he is a “compassionate and generous man.”

[Breitbart]

Canadian pastor detained in North Korea ‘admits to subversive plots’

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A South Korean news agency is reporting that a Canadian pastor detained in North Korea has confessed to “subversive plots” against the Communist state during a televised news conference.

Yonhap says Rev. Hyeon Soo Lim of the Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Mississauga, Ontario, is quoted by the Korean Central News Agency as saying he was “a servant of the U.S. imperialists and South Korean puppet group.”

A church spokeswoman says Lim was on a humanitarian mission to North Korea when he was detained in early February. Lisa Pak says the 60-year-old Christian missionary left Canada on Jan. 27 with stops in South Korea and China before crossing into North Korea on Jan. 31.

She says Lim’s family remains hopeful he will be released at some point, but didn’t want to comment on the reports of his alleged confessions. A Foreign Affairs spokeswoman says the government is “deeply concerned” and continues to try to arrange consular access and a find resolution to his case.

At Thursday’s news conference, Lim reportedly said that he travelled to several parts of the country pretending to deliver aid, but his real purpose was “to build a base to overthrow the system of the country and create a religious state.” He then went on to apologize for his “indescribable treason.”

Pak says the pastor has a deep love for the North Korean people, which is the reason he has visited the country more than 100 times. Lim’s family has previously said that much of his work has focused on the impoverished country’s northeastern region of Rason. Pak said he has also helped out schools, an orphanage and a nursing home.

[Brandon Sun]

Kang Chol Hwan and three-generation re-education for treason

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Kang Chol Hwan was 9 years old when his grandfather, a high-level government official and ethnic Korean immigrant from Japan, suddenly disappeared. Within a few weeks, soldiers came for the rest of his family, summarily stating that Kang’s grandfather had been convicted of “high treason” but giving no details. The entire three-generation family would immediately be sent to a reeduca­tion camp. The government confiscated the family’s house and nearly all its possessions, though the soldiers took pity on the tearful Kang and allowed him to carry out an aquarium of his favorite tropical fish. Soon after the family’s arrival at the Yodok concentration camp in the country’s northeastern mountains, the fish floated dead in their tank.

The family would spend the next decade in one of Kim Il-sung’s most notorious gulags. Kang’s daily life alternated between school—rote memorization of communist propaganda—and slave labor in the camp’s cornfields, lumberyards, and gold mines. For a time, Kang’s work detail included burying the corpses of prisoners who died daily from starvation or perished in mine cave-ins and dynamite accidents.

Children who disobeyed even slightly were beaten. Adult transgressors spent days, or even months, in the sweatbox, a tiny windowless shack in which victims could only crouch on hands and knees. Sometimes prisoners, including Kang, would be required to witness executions. Once he and other inmates were ordered to stone the hanging corpses of would-be escapees. “The skin on the victims’ faces eventually came undone and nothing remained of their clothing but a few bloody shreds,” Kang would later describe it. “I had the strange feeling of being swallowed up in a world where the earth and sky had changed places.”

As the years passed, Kang became a resourceful survivor. He learned to eat wild salamanders in a single swallow and catch rats with a lasso he designed out of wire. Their meat sustained him and several family members on the verge of starvation through winters at subzero temperatures.     Continued