Category: Prison Camps

Jeffrey Fowle released by North Korea

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Jeffrey Fowle, one of three Americans held by North Korea, has been released, the White House says.

Fowle, 56, who was detained in June, allegedly for leaving a Bible in his hotel room in North Korea, was home today after negotiators secured his release. At the time, North Korean state media said he had “acted in violation of the [North Korean] law, contrary to the purpose of tourism during his stay.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest says the Pentagon provided Fowle with a flight home.

“While this is a positive decision by the DPRK, we remain focused on the continued detention of Kenneth Bae and Matthew Miller and call on the DPRK to immediately release them,” Earnest said, referring to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

[NPR]

North Korean Ambassador says his country will keep nuclear program

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Jang Il Hun, North Korea’s deputy U.N. ambassador in New York, told VOA that his country already declared itself a nuclear-armed state in its constitution and adopted a new policy calling for expansion of nuclear weapons. In a rare interview, he stated his country’s positions on the nuclear issue, human rights, and American detainees.

“If America continues to press us on the human rights issue, we have no option but to review our policy toward America completely,” warned Jang. He did not elaborate on what a review of policy meant specifically.

Recently, the country signaled renewed interest in resuming the stalled nuclear talks. However, Jang raised doubts about the prospect of resuming the talks. “I do not see the point of having the six-party talks at this point,” he said.

He accused the U.S. of masterminding international criticism of his country’s human rights records to launch a smear campaign against the country’s political system.

Asked whether the North will allow a visit by an investigator from outside to probe the human rights situation inside the country, the North Korean envoy replied: “It is a subject for discussion as long as the matter is handled in a positive manner.”

On the possibility of negotiating the release of the three Americans being detained in North Korea, Jang said it would be difficult, saying “it is a matter of enforcing law.”

[VoA]

A slightly more open North Korea?

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Just like that, Kim Jong-un was back. Despite his disappearances, this latest incident does reveal that the present leader is relatively more open than his father, Kim Jong-il, and grandfather, “Eternal President” Kim Il-sung. Neither ever publicly acknowledged so much as having a wife, let alone any other human frailties. The first Kim was always carefully photographed to avoid showing the huge goiter on his neck, while the second suffered a series of maladies – including an apparent stroke in 2008 – that were never mentioned in the North Korean press.

But in last Tuesday’s reports, there was 31-year-old Kim Jong-un propped up on a cane at the apartment complex, holding the cane as he rode around on an electric cart, leaning on it as he sat on a couch.

“There is a pattern here of being more forthcoming, a little less cryptic,” said John Delury, a North Korea watcher at Yonsei University in Seoul. “His father was always restrained, keeping his distance, but Kim Jong-un is shown shaking hands, with his arms around people, slapping their backs. He’s more like a Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.”

Of course, none of this is to suggest that North Korea has suddenly become an open, liberal democracy. But it is part of a pattern of marginally greater transparency that began when Kim succeeded his father at the end of 2011.

When a satellite intended to celebrate the centenary of the founding president Kim’s birth failed to reach orbit in 2012, Pyongyang immediately conceded that the launch had been a failure – something that would have been unthinkable in the second Kim’s “military first” era.

Last year, state media reported in vivid detail that Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-taek, had been purged and later executed. This year, the official mouthpieces said that an apartment building, part of a great construction boom under Kim, had collapsed.

More recently, North Korea has admitted to running “reform through labor” camps, although its description was a far cry from the brutal gulags described by defectors. It is even engaging with the United Nations on human rights, albeit in the very limited way.

[South China Morning Post]

EU and Japan press for war crimes probes in North Korea

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The European Union and Japan are asking the United Nations to press for war crimes prosecutions in North Korea. The measure to be presented to the U.N. General Assembly in the coming weeks would ask the Security Council to consider targeted sanctions against North Korean leaders “who appear to be most responsible for crimes against humanity.” It added that these crimes were “pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the state for decades.”

The draft resolution, which was obtained by AFP, draws heavily from a U.N. rights inquiry released in February that revealed a vast network of prison camps and documented cases of torture, enslavement, rape and forced abortions among other violations.

“The draft resolution represents a clear shift towards recognizing that responsibility for the horrific abuses in North Korea lies squarely on the shoulders of the government,” said Param-Preet Singh from Human Rights Watch.

The draft calls on the Security Council to take stock of the report’s findings and take “appropriate action, including through consideration of referral of the situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the International Criminal Court.” It also calls for “concrete and positive results” in efforts to account for all Japanese nationals including victims of North Korean abductions during the Cold War.

A vote is expected at the 193-nation Assembly in late November.

North Korea’s ally China, which has a veto at the Security Council, was seen as likely to reject any referral of North Korean rights abuse cases to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

[The China Post]

Why North Korea’s rare willing openness?

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With Kim Jong Un still out of sight, North Korean officials have gone on a publicity blitz — making a rare move to take questions at the United Nations, arranging human rights talks with the European Union, and taking a high-level trip to South Korea.

The overtures come at a time when its human rights record has received increased scrutiny. Pyongyang’s charm offensive has raised questions of what the regime seeks and what could be happening in the country’s inner circle.

Citing over 40 different sanctions against North Korea, Ri Tong Il, the North Korean deputy ambassador to the UN, said: “This is the most brutal sanction throughout the world. No country… has been living under these sanctions. … You can imagine how these obstacles are to the peaceful environment for the people of our country.”

He adamantly defended the country’s human rights record, saying it’s “doing its best to exceed” universal human rights conventions. North Korea had issued a rosy human rights report in September, boasting that it has “the most advantageous” system.

North Korea’s outreach at the U.N., EU and South Korea comes at a time when recommendations from the scathing UN Commission of Inquiry report  — for prosecution and more sanctions — are on its way to the U.N. General Assembly.

Another North Korean official had said last week that North Korea is ready to restart nuclear talks.

[CNN]

North Korea acknowledges labor camps at UN

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A North Korean official publicly acknowledged to the international community the existence of his country’s “reform through labor” camps Tuesday, a mention that appeared to come in response to a highly critical U.N. human rights report earlier this year.

Choe Myong Nam, a North Korean foreign ministry official in charge of U.N. affairs and human rights issues, said at a briefing with reporters that his country has no prison camps and, in practice, “no prison, things like that.”

But he briefly discussed the “reform through labor” camps. “Both in law and practice, we do have reform through labor detention camps – no, detention centers – where people are improved through their mentality and look on their wrongdoings,” he said.

Such “re-education” labor camps are for common offenders and some political prisoners, but most political prisoners are held in a harsher system of political prison camps.

Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said that the mention of the reform camps was the first direct acknowledgement by a North Korean official speaking before an international audience. Last month, a senior court official mentioned the reform camps’ existence in an interview with the pro-Pyongyang website Minjok Tongshin.

“While the North Korean human rights record remains abysmal, it is very important that senior North Korean officials are now speaking about human rights, and expressing even pro forma interest in dialogue,” Scarlatoiu said in an email. While he called the mention of the reform through labor camps “a modest step in the right direction,” he stressed that this wasn’t an acknowledgement by North Korea of the harsher system of political prison camps, which are estimated to hold 120,000 people.

Diplomats for the reclusive, impoverished country also told reporters that a top North Korea official has visited the headquarters of the European Union and expressed interest in dialogue, with discussions on human rights expected next year.

The North Korean officials took several questions but did not respond to one about the health of leader Kim Jong Un, who has made no public appearances since Sept. 3 and skipped a high-profile recent event he usually attends.

 [Associated Press]

Matthew Miller’s North Korean prison photo

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matthew miller jail uniform north KoreaA North Korean government official released a photo of Miller, taken on Wednesday. Dressed in a blue-gray prison garment with the number 107 and his head shaved, Miller is seen with his eyes downcast, staring away from the camera.

Details about where he’ll serve his sentence or what labor he will be required to do were not released.

Miller was convicted of committing “acts hostile” to North Korea and sentenced earlier this month. North Korea has accused him of ripping up his visa on arrival to the country so he could go to prison and expose human rights violations there, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

KCNA described him as “rudely behaved,” saying he was sent to infiltrate prison as part of a United States campaign against North Korea. “He perpetrated the above-said acts in the hope of becoming a world famous guy and the second Snowden through intentional hooliganism,” state media said.

[CNN]

US push for Human Rights accountability in North Korea

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Seeking to push the issue of human rights abuses in North Korea up the diplomatic agenda, Secretary of State John Kerry made a passionate appeal to world leaders to seek accountability for perpetrators of torture, rape and other atrocities.

“We simply cannot be blind to egregious affronts to human nature,” Mr. Kerry said at a meeting Tuesday in New York with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea and the top United Nations official for human rights. “We cannot accept it. Silence would be greatest abuse of all.”

It was the first time the top diplomats from the three countries had publicly spoken about human rights in North Korea, though none of them spelled out exactly how to seek redress.

Any referral to the International Criminal Court would have to be authorized by the United Nations Security Council, a measure that, at the moment at least, is unlikely considering that Pyongyang’s staunch ally, China, wields veto power.

The new United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, cited a landmark report published by a United Nations commission of inquiry earlier this year documenting grave rights abuses and calling for a referral to the Hague-based tribunal.

Prince Zeid said North Korean officials had signaled the country “was prepared to some degree to open to greater engagement with international human rights mechanisms.” But, he said, his office would continue to document rights abuses there, including the establishment of a field office soon, based in South Korea.

Kerry said that abuses detailed in the UN commission’s 400-page report “have no place in the 21st century.” The commission estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are currently detained in four large camps, where deliberate starvation has been used as a means of control and punishment.

Rights activists say they are hopeful a resolution could be introduced in the General Assembly next month.

[NY Times/AP]

John Kerry speaks out on North Korean ‘evil’ labor camps

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American Secretary of State, John Kerry, has told North Korea to shut down its prison camps – describing them as an evil system. He said the barbarity and inhumanity of the labor colonies brought shame on the country.

Mr Kerry was speaking at an event in New York on North Korean human rights abuses on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting. “We simply cannot be blind to these egregious affronts to human nature… silence would be the greatest abuse of all,” said Mr Kerry at the meeting, which was also attended by the South Korean and Japanese foreign ministers.

North Korea has long rejected the charge that it maintains camps for up to a 120,000 prisoners – despite the presentation of detailed satellite pictures and testimony from former prisoners and guards. It likewise denies all charges of repression and brutality and regularly describes criticism of its record as an attempt to undermine its leadership.

US administrations were for long reluctant to challenge North Korea too forcefully on its human rights record, for fear of provoking tension in the region. Instead, they focused on North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, while attempting to draw the North Koreans into negotiations with offers of diplomatic and economic concessions.

The Obama administration, however, has increased sanctions on the North and gave its backing to a thorough human rights report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, which was published in February. That report concluded that the gravity and scale of abuses had no parallel in the contemporary world.

“The crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions, persecution on political, religious and gender grounds… and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation,” concluded the report presented by a panel of international jurists.

[BBC]

North Korea a powerful temptation for some Americans

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Sneaking into autocratic, cloistered North Korea has proven a strange and powerful temptation for some Americans. Sometimes the spur is deep religious conviction. Sometimes it’s discontent with America and a belief that things will be different in a country that can seem like its polar opposite. Quite often, analysts say, it’s mental or personal problems – or simply a case of a person acting upon a very, very bad idea.

During the Cold War, a handful of U.S. soldiers, some of whom knew little about life in the North, fled across the Demilitarized Zone and later appeared in North Korean propaganda films. Other defector soldiers had problems in their military units or issues with family at home. One was reportedly lured north by a female North Korean agent.

In the decades after the war, some Americans harbored “glamorous notions of North Korea as a socialist paradise,” said John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul. “But that’s just not part of the mix any more. Even in the furthest fringes of American online culture, you don’t find that notion.”

Mental health issues have often played a part, Delury said. “It’s seen as a forbidden country … a place that’s perceived in the American mind as being locked down,” Delury said. “To cross the border, in some ways, could be alluring” to people looking to break social rules.

Whatever their reasons, Americans detained in North Korea, including three currently in custody, are major complications for Washington, which must decide whether to let a U.S. citizen languish or to provide Pyongyang with a propaganda victory by sending a senior U.S. envoy to negotiate a release.

For North Korea, getting a senior U.S. official or an ex-president to visit is a huge propaganda coup. It allows Pyongyang to plaster its newspapers and TV screens with scenes meant to show its powerful leaders welcoming humbled American dignitaries, said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in South Korea.

Washington has repeatedly offered to send its envoy for North Korean human rights to discuss the currently detained Americans, but Pyongyang has so far balked.

“The North Koreans are in no hurry,” Lankov said. “It’s a sellers’ market. They say, ‘This is our price: a senior visit and some concessions. These are our goods, these Americans. If you don’t want to pay, that’s your problem. We can wait.’”

[AP]