Category: Prison Camps

More on UN inquiry into North Korean torture and labor camps

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Michael Kirby, an outspoken former justice of Australia’s top court, was named this week as head of a three-member team that will look into allegations of torture, food deprivation and labor camps in North Korea that are believed to hold at least 200,000 people. Kirby previously investigated human rights abuses in Cambodia.

The U.N. Human Rights Council launched the one-year inquiry on March 21, hoping to gather enough information from camp survivors and other exiles to document violations that it says may amount to crimes against humanity. The commission is expected to be up and running by early July. The U.N. team would speak to North Koreans living in South Korea, Japan and Thailand, Kirby said.

Kirby said in an interview he had received hundreds of emails from human rights groups and representatives of those alleging abuse by North Korea in the day since his appointment.

Contacting North Korean authorities would be “top of the list” of priorities, he said, adding he was hopeful of a response from the government and its strongest supporters in neighboring China and Russia but that a lack of engagement would not stop the panel from completing its task.

Kirby said it was too early to discuss possible outcomes of the inquiry, such as whether it could lead to charges in the International Criminal Courts against any individuals. “In the end, it will be the political branches of the United Nations that will be making the decisions on the report of the commission of inquiry,” he said.

The inquiry is due to file an interim report by September, with a final report due by March next year.

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UN investigating torture camps in North Korea

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The United Nations on Tuesday named a team of three human rights investigators who will look into allegations of torture and labor camps in North Korea, that are believed to hold at least 200,000 people.

The one-year inquiry, launched by the Council on March 21, hopes to gather enough information from camp survivors and other exiles to document violations that it says may amount to crimes against humanity and build a case for future prosecution. Activists hope the investigation, which is due to produce a preliminary report in September, will help expose decades of abuse by North Korea’s reclusive government.

Michael Donald Kirby, a former justice of Australia’s High Court, and Sonja Biserko, a founder of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, are to join Indonesia’s Marzuki Darusman, its current special rapporteur on North Korea, on the team, to be backed by researchers, lawyers and forensic experts.

The U.N. Human Rights Council unanimously passed a resolution brought by the European Union and Japan, and backed by the United States, which set up the inquiry and condemned alleged North Korean torture, food deprivation and labor camps.

Pyongyang denies the existence of such camps and is not expected to cooperate with the investigation, having denounced it during a U.N. Human Rights Council debate, activists said.

Reuters

Kenneth Bae humanitarian missionary to North Korea

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Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old American citizen, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in a North Korean gulag this week for “hostile acts” against the country and Kim Jong-Un’s regime. Considering the DPRK’s penchant for hyperbole and habit of punishing Americans, the truth about Bae’s situation remains murky. Here’s what we know so far:

1. Bae Dropped Out of the University of Oregon to Support His Family. 

2. Bae Owned a China-Based Tour Company That Specialized in North Korean Tours. His website read, in part: “We found ourselves falling in love with the friendly people…and fascinating culture… After realizing this love was something that needed to be shared with as many people possible, we developed Nation Tours so that others could fall in love with North Korea, too.”

One of the reasons Korean-Americans go to the country, despite warnings from the State Department, is to help missionary/humanitarian/relief operations.

3. Bae Might Have Been Helping North Korean Children.

According to friends interviewed in Tomlinson’s piece in The Oregonian, Bae was a “devout Christian.” Bae had a reputation for helping children. “What we know is that he [Bae] is a person who wants to help poor children, kotjebis (homeless children), and he took pictures of them to support them later.

4. But Bae Can’t Get Arrested for Taking Pictures of Starving Children, Can He? According to the South Korean Kookmin Ilbo newspaper (via The New York Times), and unidentified source said that Bae was arrested after North Korean officials found a hard disk belonging to Bae which contained sensitive information about the Country. “Mr. Do said that Mr. Bae might have taken pictures of North Korean orphans he wanted to help and that the authorities might have seen that as an act of propaganda against the North,” reported the New York Times’s Choe Sang-Hun in December.

Read full Atlantic Wire article

 

US citizen sentenced in North Korea to 15 years of compulsory labor for “hostile acts”

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A U.S. citizen, Kenneth Bae, was sentenced 15 years of compulsory labor by the Supreme Court of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Tuesday, the official KCNA news agency said Thursday.

State media refers to Bae as Pae Jun Ho, the North Korean spelling of his Korean name. The defendant was arrested while “committing hostile acts against the DPRK” after entering Rason City as a tourist on Nov. 3 last year, it said.

During the preliminary inquiry into his crimes, Pae “admitted that he committed crimes aimed to topple the DPRK with hostility toward it.” His crimes were “proved by evidence,” the KCNA added.

Last January’s visit to North Korea by former U.S., New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and GoogleExecutive Chairman Eric Schmidt was reportedly linked to the release of Pae.

Pae Jun Ho (Kenneth Bae) has been detained for nearly six months in North Korea. Friends and colleagues say Bae, a Korean American who was living in Washington state and described by friends as a devout Christian and a tour operator, was based in the Chinese border city of Dalian and traveled frequently to North Korea to feed orphans.

Other Americans detained in recent years were also devout Christians. While North Korea’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion, in practice only sanctioned services are tolerated by the government.

The sentencing of Kenneth Bae comes amid signs of tentative diplomacy following weeks of rising tensions in the region. Analysts say Pyongyang could use Bae as a bargaining chip as it seeks dialogue with Washington.

In Washington, the U.S. State Department had no immediate comment.

It’s not the first time an American has been arrested and sentenced to labor during a nuclear standoff. In 2009, after Pyongyang’s launch of an earlier long-range rocket and its second underground nuclear test, two American journalists were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor after sneaking across the border from China.

They later were pardoned on humanitarian grounds and released to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who flew to Pyongyang on a rescue mission. He also met with then-leader Kim Jong Il, which paved the way for talks.

American citizen faces trial in North Korea

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CNN reports North Korea plans to begin a trial against a U.S. citizen detained there last year, state media said Saturday, complicating tense relations between the two nations.

Pae Jun Ho entered North Korea as a tourist on November 3, according to the Korean Central News Agency. After his detention, evidence revealed he had committed an unspecified crime against the country, the news agency said. The agency said he confessed to the alleged offense, but did not say what it was.

“He will soon be taken to the Supreme Court of the DPRK to face judgment,” the news agency said.

Last year, consular officials from the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, which looks after U.S. interests in North Korea, visited Pae.

Who is Pae Jun Ho?

 

North Korean control even beyond its prison camps

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When Amnesty International officials scrutinized new satellite imagery of a notorious North Korean gulag, what caught their attention was not what was happening inside the fence but outside it.

A network of what appeared to be guard posts enclosing a valley and a small town indicated not an expansion of the sprawling Camp 14, as originally thought, but authorities’ control of those living beyond the camp’s perimeter. (The best-selling book “Escape from Camp 14” by author Blaine Harden has shed light onto one corner of the gulag.)

Amnesty said it commissioned satellite images and analysis of the area. It found that North Korea has constructed a 12.5-mile perimeter, much of it on steep terrain, next to the camp to encircle a valley that contains mines, orchards and a small town. While the perimeter is marked by posts and not a fence, there is controlled access and some 20 guard towers that are more concentrated near the town than the camp.

“What’s most worrisome is that it seems to expand the scope of control beyond the formal boundaries of the prison camp,” said Frank Jannuzi , deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. The rights group isn’t sure why that’s happening but says it’s another good reason to step up scrutiny of human rights conditions in the secretive nation, with its unparalleled restrictions on citizenry and its vast gulag.

Amnesty is pushing for member states next week at the U.N. Human Rights Council to support an independent commission of inquiry into systematic abuses and crimes against humanity in North Korea. That would add international pressure on Pyongyang, which was hit Thursday with its latest round of U.N. sanctions.

A U.N. special rapporteur on human rights is due to present a report on North Korea to the council in Geneva on Monday. Japan, Europe, the U.S. and South Korea have all indicated support for some kind of enhanced inquiry mechanism, and only half of the 47 member states on the council will need to vote in favor for it to be established.

UN human rights experts urge inquiry into North Korean political prison camps

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A group of United Nations independent human rights experts today urged an international inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea (DPRK), where hundreds of thousands of prisoners and their families are believed to suffer in the country’s extensive political prison camp system.

“I call on the UN Member States to set up an inquiry into grave, systematic and widespread violations of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and to recommend ways to ensure accountability for possible crimes against humanity,” the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the DPRK, Marzuki Darusman, said in a news release.

He and the other experts stressed that reports coming from the DPRK are “extremely serious and disturbing” and that the time has come to shine a light of truth on these allegations by appointing a robust independent international inquiry.

In December 2012, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, met with two survivors of the country’s political prison camps – which are believed to be in operation since the 1950s and contain at least 150,000 people – urging the international community to launch an inquiry.

In today’s press release, the experts noted that prisoners do not have access to healthcare and very limited food rations resulting in near starvation. Prisoners are allegedly commonly forced to work seven days a week in laborious industries like mining and farming, and sometimes in dangerous conditions.

“Many prisoners have been declared guilty of political crimes such as expressing anti­socialist sentiments, having unsound ideology, or criticizing the Government,” said El-Hadji Malick Sow, who currently chairs the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. “But all it takes to be sent to the camps is reading a foreign newspaper.”

According to the experts, up to three generations of family members of detainees are sent to the camps on the basis of guilt by association, or yeonjwa je.

Keeping North Koreans in chains through military tension

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North Korean officials say they hope to conduct one or two more nuclear tests this year in an effort to force the United States into diplomatic talks.

But the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-un and his predecessors is notoriously unable to come to any negotiating table: North Korea is built on unblinking loyalty, even worship, of the ruling Kim family combined with the fervently held doctrine of juche, or self-reliance. Juche holds that man “is the master of everything and decides everything,” according to the government’s website. And it demands that any departure from official dictates be severely punished. That’s why North Korea has the fourth-largest army in the world—and why military prowess advances while ordinary citizens suffer.

Others agree that without the nuclear threat Pyongyang cannot get Washington’s attention. “A North Korea without nuclear weapons,” writes Sohn Gwang Joo, director of Daily NK, “is just a regime burdened by economic woes, inflicting human rights abuses on its people. … Only with nuclear weapons are they able to maintain their regime, hidden away from the world. This is how they keep their people in chains: through military tension.”

One week after the test, two survivors of North Korea’s state gulag testified before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Shin Dong-hyuk and Kang Chol-hwan say the state’s political prison system is incarcerating 200,000 “criminals”—many of them Christians—in Holocaust-like camps: “Fundamentally, it is the same as Hitler’s Auschwitz,” testified Kang.

“People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. It is still going on in North Korea,” Shin told reporters on the sidelines of the human-rights summit. He is the only known surviving escapee from a “total control zone” camp—where three generations of his family had been held until he broke free seven years ago at age 23. When at 22 Shin met a new prisoner, he was unaware of any alternative reality existing outside the camps.

[World] 

North Korean nuclear test also meant for North Korean regime opponents

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Shin Dong-hyuk spent his first 23 years in North Korean prison camp 14, where he was tortured and subjected to forced labor. Another North Korean prison camp survivor, Chol-Hwan Kang, spent 10 years in Camp 15.

Kang suggests that Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test was meant not only as a message of strength to the outside world but also to potential opponents to the regime within the country. Both men say the international community must do more to help North Koreans, with Kang insisting the world should take advantage of growing feelings of opposition within the communist state.

Both Shin and Kang described life in their labor camps as defined by hunger and violence.
“Daily I saw torture, and every day in the camp I saw people dying of malnutrition and starvation. I saw lots of friends die and I almost died myself of malnutrition,” Kang recalled.

Shin still carries the scars of his experience on his body. Resting his right hand on the table in front of him, he revealed the missing tip of his middle finger, which was chopped off by a prison guard as punishment after he dropped a piece of machinery in a factory.

“I’m here outside the camp, but what I’m doing daily is talk about the situation in the camp,” Shin said. “I’m still in the camp in my head.”

After meeting Shin and hearing his harrowing account in December, UN right chief Navi Pillay called for an in-depth international inquiry into “one of the worst, but least understood and reported, human rights situations in the world.”

[News24]

North Korean labor camps compared to Nazi Holocaust

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North Korea’s prison camps are a closed-off world of death, torture and forced labor where babies are born slaves, according to two survivors who liken the horrors of the camps to a Holocaust in progress.

“People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. It is still going on in North Korea,” Shin Dong-hyuk told AFP through an interpreter on the sidelines of a human rights summit in Geneva.

Shin himself spent his first 23 years in a prison camp in the secretive country, where he says he was tortured and subjected to forced labor before making a spectacular escape seven years ago – and giving the outside world a rare first-hand account of life inside the camps.

The 30-year-old is the only person known to have been born in such a camp to flee and live to tell the tale, and was portrayed in a book by journalist Blaine Harden published last year called “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West.”

While Shin’s comparison with Nazi concentration camps – where the majority of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust were murdered – may seem extreme, another North Korean prison camp survivor, Chol-Hwan Kang, agreed with the analogy.

“Fundamentally, it is the same as Hitler’s Auschwitz,” Kang told AFP. With whole families in North Korea thrown into camps together and starving to death, he said the “methods may be different, but the effect is the same… It’s outrageous!”

Kang, now 43, was sent to Camp 15 with his whole family when he was nine years old to repent for the suspected disloyalties of his grandfather. He spent 10 years there before his family was released and later managed to flee to China and on to South Korea – the same route taken by Shin.

[News24]