Category: Prison Camps

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 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]

Canadian pastor detained in North Korea?

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A Canadian pastor is missing after going on a trip to North Korea in late January, says his family and church.

Reverend Hyeon Soo Lim, 60, went to North Korea on a humanitarian trip as he had done over a hundred times before, said Lisa Pak, a spokesperson for his church, based in Mississauga, Ontario.

On January 30, Lim traveled to North Korea from China with a companion from the church who last spoke with him the following day, on January 31.

Lim was scheduled to return on February 4 from what was described as a “routine” trip to Rajin, located northeast in the country, where his church supports a nursery, orphanage and nursing home, according to the Light Korean Presbyterian Church. However, so far he has failed to show.

The church has formally requested help in finding Lim from Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, and has contacted the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, which provides consular help for citizens of the U.S., Canada and Australia, which do not have diplomatic ties with North Korea.

Lim immigrated to Canada in 1986 from South Korea with his wife and son. He speaks fluent Korean and leads a 3,000-member church. The church’s spokesman, Pak said she doesn’t believe Lim would have engaged in any type of proselytizing, which is prohibited in North Korea.

“He knows the language, he knows the nature of the government, so we don’t see that as a legitimate reason that he would be detained,” Pak said. “We don’t believe that’s the way he would have behaved. He’s very wise about that.”

[CNN]

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]

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]

The Silent Scream of the North Koreans

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Tuesday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of a United Nations’ Commission on Inquiry’s report on human rights in North Korea. The U.N. report laid out, in devastating detail, what we’ve known for all too long: The regime’s “systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights,” the report found, “entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”

And while 25,000 North Koreans have escaped to South Korea, and perhaps 200,000 North Koreans are in hiding in China, some 25 million North Koreans continue to suffer in silence, unable to communicate to the outside world because of their enslavement at the hands of their government.

To mark the one-year anniversary of the U.N. report – which, sadly, has yet to have a discernable effect on life in North Korea – the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, in Washington, D.C., convened a panel discussion with three defectors. The tales that the three former North Koreans – Hyun-ah Ji, Praise Joo, and Johan Kim – told were predictably grim, involving torture, hunger, and fierce repression. But the panelists also struck a positive tone, noting that the world is paying attention to North Korea’s abuses (they have been traveling the States for weeks, telling their stories), and trumpeting the success of initiatives like balloon launches into North Korea (which one panelist said the North Korean regime hates the most), and broadcasting free media into the country.

That these courageous refugees are devoting their life to talking about North Korea shows, in a tragic way, that they are in some sense still psychological prisoners of the regime – they cannot escape. But the world — and their fellow countrymen — benefit from their bravery. For these defectors speak for the 25 million North Koreans who cannot.

[WeeklyStandard.com] 

The one-year anniversary of the UN report on human rights in North Korea

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Commemorating the one-year anniversary of the report by United Nations Commission of Inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, an unprecedented gathering of policy makers, opinion leaders, and stakeholders on the topic of North Korean human rights took place on February 17th.

The gathering aims to carry forward the momentum created by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry report and subsequent UN action.

[CSIS, Washington DC]

Nothing to celebrate about Kim Jong-Il on Feb 16

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North Korea’s so-called dear leader, Kim Jong-Il, should be remembered as his country celebrates his birthday on February 16, 2015, for presiding over one of the world’s most brutal and repressive governments, Human Rights Watch said.

“Kim Jong-Il ruled North Korea based on rights abuses, repression, and ruthlessness and prioritized maintaining his power over the welfare of the people, even as the country was facing widespread starvation,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director.

“Unfortunately, his son Kim Jong-Un, North Korea’s new leader, has continued many of his father’s abusive policies without pause.”

Kim Jong-Il took over the country in 1994 after the death of his father, Kim Il-Sung, who had ruled North Korea since 1948. His economic mismanagement combined with natural disasters forced the country into what later became known as the Arduous March, a severe famine that provoked despair and massive starvation. Kim Jong-Il and his government focused on a policy ofsongun (military first), which allocated the country’s remaining scarce resources and food to the Korean People’s Army. Kim Jong-Il ensured that the military and government elites were least affected while a still unknown number of North Koreans – estimates range from several hundred thousand to 3.5 million – died of starvation between 1994 and 1998, the most acute phase of the crisis.

Kim Jong-Il’s rights-abusing legacy also includes a massive system of kwanliso (gulag-like political prison camps) to instill fear among the people. Between 80,000 and 120,000 North Koreans are estimated to still be in kwanliso, which are characterized by systemic abuse and deadly conditions, including torture and sexual abuse by guards, near-starvation rations, back-breaking forced labor in dangerous conditions, and executions.

“The world should remember Kim Jong-Il’s brutality and his government’s horrific record of rights abuse, which only now has finally reached the international community’s agenda,” Robertson said. “The world needs to show North Korea that these serious human rights abuses will not go unpunished, and that there needs to be justice for these actions.”

[Read full Human Rights Watch article]