An Interview with HRNK Report Author David Hawk

HRNK Hidden Gulag series report author David Hawk discussing North Korea’s prison camps with HRNK.

© 2015 Committee for Human Rights in North Korea

On August 24, 2015, HRNK Director of Programs Rosa Park and Outreach Coordinator Raymond Ha traveled to David Hawk’s home in New Jersey to interview the author on his upcoming report for HRNK, The Hidden Gulag IV: Gender Repression and Prisoner Disappearances. This report, along with North Korea: Imagery Analysis of Camp 15 “Yodŏk” –Closure of the “Revolutionizing Zone” by AllSource Analysis and HRNK, was launched on September 18, 2015 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

Interviewer: How did the first Hidden Gulag come about?

David Hawk: Well, when the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea was first formed, it was known generally but vaguely that there were prison camps of some sort or another in North Korea, and they hired me to go to South Korea at a time when there were 3,000 refugees or defectors from North Korea who had gone to China and come around to South Korea via Mongolia or via Southeast Asia. Among the 3,000 refugees or defectors, there were several score who had been imprisoned while they were still in North Korea. So, I was hired to go to Seoul and interview them and prepare a report on political prison camps in North Korea.

The Committee [for Human Rights in North Korea] had decided that rather than hire a Korea specialist or a Korean speaking scholar, they wanted someone with a broad background in human rights and a broader background in phenomena of repression in a variety of countries and political situations. Since I had previously worked on documenting the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and the massacres in Rwanda, I had experience with documenting worst case violations. So, they asked me if I would be interested in undertaking a study, and I was very much interested because when I was Executive Director and then on the board of Amnesty [International] and on the board of directors of Human Rights Watch Asia in the 70s and 80s, we both at Amnesty and Human Rights Watch did a lot of work on South Korea at a time when South Korean students and workers and pastors and journalists were very actively engaged in protesting the military dictatorship. While we were doing that work in the late 70s and 1980s, we were aware that it was probably much worse in North Korea than it was in South Korea in terms of human rights violations, but there was no information or the possibility to get information on North Korea in those decades.

So, when they told me that there were several dozen former North Koreans who had been in various prison situations in North Korea, I thought this would be a very interesting challenge and opportunity to fill in that gap in our knowledge of repression around the world. That is, if you go back and look at the annual reports of Amnesty International or the annual reports of Human Rights Watch when that NGO was started, and you look in the annual reports for the entries on North Korea, mostly what you see is a paragraph saying, “We don’t have any information.” Yet, you’d have pages and pages on human rights violations in South Korea because we were able to get the name, information, and circumstances of pretty nearly every student, pastor, or worker who was arrested protesting the military dictatorship. So I thought this would be a unique challenge and an opportunity to fill in that gap in our knowledge of repression around the world.

Interviewer: You are now on the fourth edition of The Hidden Gulag. What got you interested in the topic of North Korean political prison camps?

Hawk: Well, it was known, vaguely, generally, that there were prison camps of one sort or another in North Korea. This was known primarily by the Korea scholars who had looked at the purges of the Workers’ Party, the army, and the general populace in the late 1960s and 70s. But it was a consensus, a global consensus, that these sorts of concentration camps, labor camps, political prison camps, were a phenomena associated with the totalitarian regimes of fascism and communism that were supposed to have gone from the scene at the end of WWII or following the death of Stalin. So, the idea that there were ongoing political prison camps or concentration camps or forced labor camps, as they are variously called, was something that struck the members of the committee as something that should not be existing in the 21st century, as this was part of the awful residue of the 20th century.

Well, it was initially the members of the Board of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea that selected the topic, and the reason they were interested was that it was widely thought that concentration camps, forced labor camps, and political prison camps were a phenomena that were associated with the terrible human destructions in the 20th century with European fascism or Soviet communism. It was known vaguely and generally that there were prison camps of some sort in North Korea because the Korea scholars had tried to document Kim Il-sung’s purge of the party, the army, the government, and the general populace of Korea. There was a consensus certainly in human rights and much broader circles that these kind of gross human rights violations are something that should have passed from the scene at the end of WWII, certainly by the end of the 20th century.

Interviewer: How has The Hidden Gulag research methodology changed over the years?

Hawk: The biggest change in research methodology was the availability of Google Earth. For the first edition of The Hidden Gulag, what we did was obtain very detailed maps of North Korea basically dating to the 1950s. These were maps of North Korea by the U.S. Army that were by this point unclassified; they were very detailed and had degrees of latitude and longitude. These were very large maps; we’d roll them up and send them in mailers to our colleagues in Seoul, who would bring the former North Korean prisoners to their offices, and they’d look at the map, try to find the prison camp on the map, plot the coordinates, and we then would call up one of two commercial satellite photograph companies and see if they had any footage available for those coordinates. We’d then print out the footage—these were about 2 feet wide and 12 feet long— and we’d roll up those, send them to our colleagues in Seoul, who would again call the former political prisoners to their offices, and they’d then pore over for hours the satellite images of the camps. They were quite surprised because they could find their houses and their work units and other landmarks in the prison camps and identify them. 

We then used computers to input their identification onto the satellite photographs. It was a bit of a hit or miss process in that sometimes they picked the coordinates of the nearest town and they could recognize the road, but the prison camp itself was a little further away. So we’d get another set of coordinates and call back the satellite companies to see if they had in their storage discs any satellite imagery for the new coordinates, send the new coordinates, and mail them back over to Seoul. This was a very arduous process. It took an extra six months to do this process of getting the satellite imagery.

The author at home in New Jersey looking at satellite imagery provided by AllSource Analysis.

© 2015 Committee for Human Rights in North Korea

The satellite imagery was enormously important because it backed up the prisoners’ testimony about places that the regime denies exists. Of course, the regime won’t allow the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] to have access to any of these facilities; nobody gets to see these places. It was very important to have the satellite images. After Google Earth came online, it became very, very easy. In fact, the Korean language version of Google Earth is very good and very precise. If you take the English language version and type in a romanized Korean name, you don’t get very much. But if you’re working off the Korean language Hangul script in Google Earth, and you type that in, it just zooms right to it. It’s now very, very easy for North Koreans to go online and look at their hometowns and places they visited, and, in this case, the prison camps where they were detained and subjected to forced labor.

The reason that it is important to do periodic updates is because we’re in the odd situation of only being able to find out about human rights violations in North Korea between two and five years after the violations occur. So we’re constantly playing catch up, as it were. What has to happen in terms of arbitrary detention, political imprisonment, and forced labor is that you have to wait until after the prisoner is released or, in a couple of cases, escapes, and then spends several months or even several years inside North Korea plotting the escape to China. The refugees in China spend months or several years getting enough money, making enough connections for the journey from Northeast China through Mongolia, or down through south China and Southeast Asia to get to Seoul. It’s not until the former prisoners get to Seoul that they’re really accessible to foreign journalists, or particularly Western journalists, scholars, or human rights investigators.

Because North Korea doesn’t allow North Korean citizens to make international phone calls or to have access to the Internet, there is a two to five year time lag between the time when violations occur in North Korea and when the outside world can find out about it. The prisoners have to be released, and they spend several months, possibly several years, in North Korea organizing their defection, their escape to China. Most of the North Korean refugees in China need to spend months, or even several years in China obtaining the funds and making the connections necessary for the onward journey from Northeast Asia down to south China and then through Southeast Asia or sometimes through Beijing and then Mongolia. It is not until these former victims of human rights violations reach South Korea that they’re available to Western journalists or scholars or human rights investigators. This process can take two to five years, so we’re in a constant catch-up game trying to find out recent developments. Recent developments aren’t like in the rest of the world where recent developments are something that happened yesterday or ten minutes ago that just was put on YouTube or over the Internet. There is this long delay, and up to now, there was no way around that, really.

Interviewer: What is the most interesting thing you found while interviewing these three women?

Hawk: Actually, I interviewed seven or eight women, but three from this particular kyo-hwa-so prison where they just built a new wing of the prison to accommodate the increasing number of women prisoners. Jongo-ri Kyo-hwa-so is written up in the first and second editions of The Hidden Gulag when it was a men’s prison. But we learned that, six years ago or so, the authorities constructed a new area of the prison to accommodate around 1,000 women prisoners. I interviewed three women prisoners from the Kyo-hwa-so Number 12. 

Google Earth and © 2015 DigitalGlobe image of Kyo-hwa-so No. 12 Jongo-ri, 6/29/2015

© 2015 Committee for Human Rights in North Korea

What was most interesting was the senselessness and the perniciousness of punishing these women for having gone to China in search of food because of the chronic food shortage, particularly in the northeast provinces of North Korea, or for employment so they can get the money so that their families back in North Korea can buy food in the markets. It’s actually one of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that people have the right to leave and return to their country of origin. This right is also included in the international law forum–the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights extends the right to leave and return to one’s country of origin. But North Korea makes that a crime. Previously, tens of thousands fled at the height of the famine in North Korea. 

Currently, large numbers of North Korean women who, because of the food shortage and because there is no work in North Korea, go to China and work in service industries of various kinds. They are treated as illegal immigrants once in China. The Chinese police catch them and repatriate them to North Korea where they are punished, severely in many cases, for having left their country of origin in search of food or money to buy food. Those North Koreans who are repatriated and investigated by the North Korean police after they are repatriated, if the North Korean authorities believe there was the intent to defect to South Korea, then those forcibly repatriated North Koreans are sent to the kwan-li-so political prison camps. There are tens of thousands of North Korean women who were in China not with the intent to flee to South Korea but to get food or to find a job. Because of the harshness of the punishment, it sets up a terrible situation for these North Korean women in China. There is a separate report on this: Lives for Sale by the Committee [for Human Rights in North Korea] which came out several years ago. 

This process is also detailed in the 2nd edition of The Hidden Gulag that discusses where the North Korean refugees in China are repatriated from and the different kinds of punishments that are meted out to them. But the fact that the punishment is so severe sets up a terrible situation where North Korean women in China are subjected to trafficking and a lot of other violations and very difficult situations. This happens because of the senseless punishment of the North Korean women who have gone to China in search of food or employment. So, the most interesting thing about the three women from Jongo-ri Kyo-hwa-so was the senselessness of their imprisonment and their severe punishment under very brutal conditions and the perniciousness of the risks that this exposes North Korean women to in China. It’s senseless and it is pernicious. 

They were using prison labor to make wigs and eyelashes that were probably being sold in China or shipped somewhere else. 

The other interesting thing about the women’s section at Jongo-ri Prison was that in addition to the normal forced labor, which is mostly agricultural production or mining or timber cutting, at Jongo-ri there was a work unit to make wigs and one to make eyelashes. The prison was getting boxes of hair that were sent from Pyongyang, but the prisoners believe that the hair was being collected in China, and the women prisoners would sort the hair into color and length, thread the hair into needles, sew the hairs into the fabric that was going to go next to the head, and then the wigs would be returned and sent somewhere else for finishing. They were using prison labor to make wigs and eyelashes that were probably being sold in China or shipped somewhere else. I hadn’t encountered that kind of forced labor for those purposes. There was another women’s prison in Kaechon where there were textile units that made clothing for sale abroad, but I hadn’t encountered the forced labor for wig making or eyelash production previously. I found the women’s testimony about the production techniques for making wigs in a terrible North Korean prison interesting to hear about.

Interviewer: Why should we, as the American public, care about these political prison camps halfway around the world? Why should we keep track of ongoing changes?

These are not your run-of-the-mill prisons. 

People are being persecuted and subjected to forced labor under extremely brutal conditions for having exercised their rights. 

They are being detained arbitrarily, and their detention constitutes crimes against humanity. 

Hawk: The severe violations that are the phenomena of repression associated with these prisons, prison camps, forced labor in North Korea are gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, and they are what are considered to be worst-case violations, which are really atrocities and are recognized in international law as atrocities, as crimes against humanity. These are not your run-of-the-mill prisons. People are being persecuted and subjected to forced labor under extremely brutal conditions for having exercised their rights. They are being detained arbitrarily, and their detention constitutes crimes against humanity. The same reason that international public opinion as a whole should care about the crimes against humanity in North Korea is for the same reason that people care about genocides in Cambodia or Rwanda, or the anarchy, the dreadful situation in eastern Congo. These are worst-case violations, they shouldn’t be occurring in the 21st century. The only recourse available is to try to mobilize international public opinion and the governments of other nation-states around the world to try to put pressure or try to persuade the North Korean authorities that it has to improve the human rights situation in North Korea.

Interviewer: On that note, why should the international community be concerned about the North Korean political prison camps and the ongoing changes?

Hawk: As I mentioned before, there is a two to five year delay from the time violations are committed until the outside world can find out about it. We know that there are enormous changes going on in North Korea from the bottom up, primarily with the creation of markets, which the regime in the 1990s and first decade of the 20th century tried very hard to suppress but did not succeed in suppressing. Now, the real life situation of most North Koreans is very different from what it was a decade ago because they now get their food and their clothing not through the Public Distribution System or from factories or mines that aren’t working but from markets. We know that there are changes. We also know that information from the outside world is increasingly seeping into North Korea in the form of video, radio broadcasts, and on DVDs and thumb drives, so we want to try, even though there is a time delay between when the violations are committed and we find out about it, we still want to see what these developments are, and particularly, hopefully, if there are some improvements. 

I have, it’s only a general sense, but I believe there are less public executions going on in North Korea than was the case in the 1990s and the early part of the 21st century. I believe that the number of public executions has gone down. It is my sense also that there are fewer North Koreans who are being imprisoned for the political offenses of their parents or their grandparents. It is a very unusual phenomena of oppression that was unique to North Korea, although it was practiced during the Chosun dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries. We hear fewer reports of people being imprisoned and subjected to forced labor for the political offenses, real or imagined, of their grandparents. Since the North Korean authorities won’t allow human rights investigators or the Red Cross or NGOs like Amnesty or Human Rights Watch to go in and make on-site confirmations of either the claims of the government or the testimony of the refugees, we need to as best we can keep track of the most recent developments, even if the most recent developments are two to five years previous.

Interviewer: You include a list of 121 missing people in your report. How do you recommend that we find these missing people?

Hawk: Well, let me first explain what the missing people are and how we come by their names. The report that the Committee [for Human Rights in North Korea] put out a year and a half ago talked about the dismantlement of Camp 18 and the closure of Camp 22. When Camp 22 closed, the prisoners at night were trucked to a train station in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province. The trains departed going south. We don’t know what happened to those people. There are sketchy reports that they were transferred to Camp 16 or Camp 14 when they closed Camp 22, but the satellite imagery of Camp 14 or 16 doesn’t show the expansion of those camps sufficient to accommodate the former prisoners of Camp 22. But in the case of Camp 22, we don’t have the names of individual prisoners. Our information about Camp 22 came from former guards who defected to South Korea, who told us, “We have no names of the prisoners who were in the past imprisoned in Camp 22.” 

Another one of the kwan-li-so prison camps is called Camp 15, or it’s called Yodok Camp, after the name of a local town. Camp 15 was unique in that it had portions of the prison camp that they called “total control zones,” where the prisoners were held for life. They were brought in as children or grandchildren of political offenders, or as the presumed or real political offenders themselves, and would spend the rest of their lives, as short or long as they were, in forced labor. But in addition to these total control zones, there were what the North Koreans called “revolutionizing zones,” where people who were not deemed implacable “counter-revolutionaries” were sent for a period of three to ten years of forced labor, after which they were potentially eligible for release back into North Korean society. These revolutionizing zones are sometimes called “re-education camps.” I don’t like that terminology because they’re essentially not receiving education. It’s forced labor; they are being brutally punished. Even in the re-revolutionizing zones, many prisoners die from malnutrition. There are executions. There is torture. There is nothing going on in these revolutionizing areas of Camp 15 that merit the term “educational.”

The North Korean technical term is “revolutionizing zone,” and what’s unique about this particular revolutionizing zone called Sorimchon is that one of the prisoners who was released after three years had a photographic memory. When he was first imprisoned for being forcibly repatriated from China, he was assigned to an agricultural production unit. But then he was reassigned to assist in the administration and record keeping of the Sorimchon revolutionizing section of Camp 15. As part of his work in the record keeping section, he got to see the records of prisoners, and he got to meet a lot of them in discussing their individual work assignments with them and their production experiences. This particular prisoner had a photographic memory, so when he was released and later escaped to South Korea, he, with South Korean activists, sat down and made a list of 181 former prisoners. Of those 181, some were released, a number were executed, and quite a number died of starvation and malnutrition while in the labor camp. 

Of the 181, there are 121 whose whereabouts are unknown. We know that they were imprisoned, and it is really unusual to have the names and biographical information, the prior occupation, the age, of these prisoners. Of the 181, the status of 121 are unknown. Some of them could have been released, some of them could have died in detention, some of them could been moved to the lifetime imprisonment total control zones within Camp 15. We don’t know the fate or the whereabouts of the 121 former North Korean prisoners. That is highly unusual that we have the names of any of them at all. 

In a sense, these North Korean political prisoners have doubly disappeared. They were sent to Camp 15 without any trial or judicial process or sentencing or charges. They were not imprisoned according to the DPRK Criminal Code and criminal procedure provisions. They were just abducted by the political state security police and deported to the camps. They are held in incommunicado detention. Their families or their friends or former work colleagues are provided no information about what happened to these people after they were deported to Camp 15. The technical human rights term is “enforced disappearances.” These people were grabbed by police operating on the authority of the state and simply deported or deposited in the camps, and their fates and whereabouts are unknown. That was their first forcible disappearance. Then [based on] what we saw in recent satellite imagery about actually a year ago on Google Earth, it became apparent that the prisoner residence units in the Sorimchon section of Camp 15 and the animal, it was agricultural production and animal husbandry, but the pens for the animals, the warehouses for agricultural implements, and machinery were destroyed and demolished, as were all of the prisoner housing units. The Sorimchon section of Camp 15 does not exist anymore, and so we don’t know what happened to the former prisoners from the Sorimchon section of Camp 15. But in this case we have their names and some of the personal identification about these 181, including these 121 doubly disappeared North Korean prisoners.

Interviewer: How can we hold the North Korean regime responsible for the 121 missing people included in the report?

Hawk: We actually want to hold them responsible and accountable for a lot more than the 121; it’s just that in this case, we have their names. It is a well established principle of contemporary international law that those who commit atrocities should be held accountable and should be asked to account for the violations of human rights that are so severe that they are considered to be atrocity crimes. That has do be done primarily through the efforts of other UN Member States. It’s at this point only other governments that can demand from North Korea that North Korea hold accountable those who are responsible. There are institutions and mechanisms for doing this that, as of December of last year, are employed. An overwhelming majority of Member States in the [UN] General Assembly passed a resolution requesting the UN Security Council to refer the North Korean human rights situation to the International Criminal Court for its investigation and its prosecution of those who are responsible. It’s the Member States of the UN that have to continue to pressure North Korea to improve its human rights situation and to cease these criminal violations and to bring those who are accountable to justice. We are a long way from that happening, but it’s only since the international community took these measures in 2014 to raise the issue of accountability and obtain an account of these dreadful ongoing violations that the North Korean regime has responded at all to the concerns of the international community. 

Prior to this, there had been a decade of resolutions at the UN Human Rights Council. There had been a decade of reports by the Special Rapporteur. There had been a decade of resolutions at the General Assembly, and North Korea ignored all of that, all of those resolutions, all of those reports. It’s only when the international community raised the issue of accountability that the North Koreans responded. They responded in a variety of ways, none of which are the responses that are desired, such as allowing the ICRC to conduct on-site investigations, or for the regime to admit that these violations are taking place, that these prison camps exist. It’s only when the international community, other governments raised the issue of accountability that North Korea responded at all, which is why it’s important to continue to update the situation and continue to request that other governments continue to persuade the North Korean government to change its policies.

David Hawk representing HRNK at the UN Human Rights Council’s 30^th Session on Sept. 21, 2015 in Geneva, Switzerland. © 2015 U.S. Mission Geneva

Read More

Categories: analysis, China, committeehrnk, crimes against humanity, defector, DPRK, Geneva, HRNK, hrnkus, humanrights, news, nonprofit, SpecialRapporteur, UN, UNCOI, UNGA, UNHRC

The Human Rights Council’s First Official Panel on North Korea

A general view during the 30th regular Session at the Human Rights Council. 21 September 2015. 

UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré

By Christine Chung

Christine Chung is a Senior Advisor to the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the former Political Advisor to the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. As a human rights officer for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, she managed the Office's technical cooperation program with China, supported the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, and served desk functions for Northeast and Southeast Asia. She is currently serving as the political analyst for the OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission to the Kyrgyz Republic Parliamentary Elections.


On Monday, September 21st in Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council elevated discussion of North Korea’s human rights situation from the side events that have regularly taken place in the halls of the Palais des Nations to the main chamber with its first official panel discussion. Although both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly’s Third Committee have regularly hosted reporting by and interactive dialogues with the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for many years, the panel featured civil society representatives alongside Marzuki Darusman, the current mandate-holder. The panel is part of the continuing legacy of the work of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK (COI), whose comprehensive report in February 2014 captured the attention of the international community with its assessment that the scale and scope of North Korea’s human rights violations amount to crimes against humanity.

Although the focus of the panel discussion was on “international abductions, enforced disappearances and related matters,” such a broad heading allowed panelists and speakers to touch on many ongoing concerns from political prison camp populations to summary executions for watching South Korean soap operas. The main question posed to the panel was raised early in the list of speakers by the representative from Albania: what further strategies are available to address the dire human rights situation in North Korea? It was repeated by various speakers thereafter. This article will address the responses of the panel, provide a summary of highlights of the discussion, and assess possible directions for the international community.

The format of the three-hour panel was to start with introductory remarks by former Chair of the COI Michael Kirby who, as the moderator, asked the panelists to make brief presentations to be followed by an interactive discussion broken into two 45 minute segments of comments and questions from the floor with 15 minutes of response by panelists. The panel was comprised of Special Rapporteur Darusman, ”Hidden Gulag” author David Hawk, Kwon Eun-Kyoung, representing the International Coalition to Stop Crimes against Humanity in North Korea, and Koichiro Iizuka, Vice Secretary-General, Association of Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea. The interactive dialogue followed Human Rights Council procedure with a registration of a list of speakers each with two minutes speaking time enforced by the Human Rights Council President H.E. Joachim Ruecker who chaired the panel.

Mr. Ruecker made one real point aside from the need for speakers to adhere to the time limit: house rules also require speakers to use the official name of the country in question. The Honorable Michael Kirby reminded the Council of the timeline of the COI and that its report had been delivered on time, on budget, and unanimously. He explained that the topics that had been singled out for the panel included a very large number of people who had been abducted and disappeared and their loved ones, even though more people would have been affected by violations of the right to food; nevertheless, these were powerful human stories of suffering and could not be ignored. The Special Rapporteur noted that there has been a new turn in the relations between North and South Korea with the next round of family reunions expected at the end of October. He appealed to both sides to amplify the number of families involved in the reunions with some 66,000 families needing to be reunified but only 100, drawn by lottery, able to participate. Mr. Kirby calculated that it would require some 660 years for all the families to be reunited at that rate.

David Hawk turned his attention to the brutal deprivation of liberty of North Koreans who are subject to incognito detention in their own country. He stressed the need to ask for an accounting of these North Koreans who are forcibly disappeared into the kwan-li-so, translated as “managed places,” but are more widely known as political prison camps whose existence the North Korean authorities continue to deny, most recently at the country’s second Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in April 2014. Koichiro Iizuka spoke of the agony of having his young single mother taken from his 3-year-old sister and him and then being told during the Japan-North Korea summit meeting in 2002 that North Korean authorities acknowledged abducting her but that she had subsequently died in a traffic accident. Eun-kyoung Kwon provided an update on frequent summary executions of people who were caught watching foreign programs on video, listening to South Korean radio broadcasts, or possessing illegal cell phones.

The North Korean delegation, as the concerned country, was given the first opportunity to speak, for five minutes instead of just two. As might have been anticipated, North Korea’s representative categorically rejected the panel as politically motivated. He characterized the panel as an unjust and dangerous precedent for the Human Rights Council. He protested the internationalization of the human rights of a particular country and repeated previously voiced claims that the COI aimed to change the socialist system of the DPRK and to eliminate its government. He also repeated what he characterized as a proverb from his country: “Mind your own business.”

The list of speakers moved from Japan—whose representative noted that there can be no normalization of relations until North Korea addresses its human rights situation and allows families of abductees to reunite—to the European Union (EU). The EU representative called for the closing of all political prison camps, reiterated support for the COI’s recommendations, including the referral of North Korea to the International Criminal Court (ICC), and welcomed the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) field-based mechanism in Seoul. Most EU Member States aligned themselves with the EU’s statement, including Ireland, Germany, Latvia, and the Czech Republic in the first segment, then Poland, the Netherlands, Austria, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Belgium in the second segment. Albania commended the panel but was followed by Cuba whose representative opposed selective and political mandates including the Special Rapporteur on North Korea and the COI. The representative stated that “dialogue” was preferable to “confrontation,” citing UPR as an ideal forum for cooperation on human rights. The emphasis on UPR as a viable alternative to country specific mandates was also raised by Myanmar, Laos, Venezuela, and Russia, while Belarus, Syria, and Iran called more generally for non-interference and cooperation. France also called for ICC referral and the need to end detentions. The United States recalled that 80,000 to 120,000 people, including children, are still languishing in political prison camps. Norway welcomed efforts to establish a contact group as recommended by the COI. Liechtenstein noted that one and a half years have passed since the findings of the COI were released and the Security Council referral of North Korea to the ICC had yet to materialize, so perhaps more urgency was required and universal jurisdiction might be considered. China’s representative said that peace is a necessary pre-condition on the peninsula. She noted that, as we observe the 10th anniversary of the joint statement from the Six Party Talks, the responsible position on Northeast Asia should involve the re-launching of denuclearization talks.

Towards the end of each interactive segment, NGOs were given the floor. Speaking for UN Watch was Yeon-mi Park, a 21-year-old woman from North Korea who eight years earlier had escaped across the river to China only to see her mother raped and sold while she herself was sold for $260 as a 13-year-old child bride. She recounted crossing the Gobi Desert under difficult conditions to Mongolia to escape trafficking in China. She objected to being called a puppet by the North Korean government and noted that her relatives were still suffering in North Korea. Human Rights Watch (HRW) made the first explicit reference to China immediately after Ms. Park’s personal story reminding the Human Rights Council that these violations have a China dimension with its government labeling all North Korean refugees as illegal economic migrants and subjecting them to repatriation. This makes China complicit in the crimes that take place in North Korea. HRW’s representative emphasized the need for collective action.

After the first segment of the interactive dialogue, Mr. Kirby responded to the North Korean representative’s charges that the COI was subject to the bidding of the United States. Given his history as a judge in Australia and the pledge of independence that he and the other commissioners took at the start of their work, he rejected the allegation of having political motivations. Noting that North Korea’s representative had made no reference to the particular issue of abductions and disappearances, he hoped that the lapse indicated North Korea’s continuing support for family reunions. Mr. Kirby characterized the problem as essentially one of mechanism rather than principle, which perhaps new technologies such as Skype and email, but also old-fashioned letters, could help to resolve. He also responded to the recitation of the North Korean proverb; since the signing of the UN Charter in 1945, universal human rights is not the business of one regime but a common issue for the international community.

The panelists provided a range of practical measures. The exception was Mr. Iizuka, who responded that as a member of the public rather than a representative of the Japanese government he was not in a position to make an official recommendation. However, as a 38-year-old Japanese citizen whose mother had been taken away by North Koreans when he was only a 1-year-old child— before he could form his own memories of her—he hoped that he could be reunited with her before it is too late. The Special Rapporteur called for a concerted intellectual effort by the international community to put in place an accountability mechanism. Mr. Hawk took exception with the North Korean claim of an international community conspiracy against their socialist system. The international concern, he explained, is about a particular phenomenon of repression. Some people believe that the progressive dismantling of Camp No. 18, which involved a broad clearance with release of prisoners in place, might also work for Camps No. 14, No. 16, and No. 25. Ms. Kwon noted that the North Korean authorities criticize the testimony of some North Korean escapees, but hundreds of cases have been filed with the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. While the North Korean authorities refuse to provide information on these cases, they have the capacity to do so.

The second segment of the interactive dialogue saw general support for the COI recommendations, including the OHCHR field office in Seoul by New Zealand, Costa Rica, Australia, Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, Canada, and the aforementioned EU states. The representative of the Republic of Korea noted that 130,000 families had been separated during the war and in its aftermath; after almost seven decades, half of them are no longer alive. He clarified that the two Koreas had agreed to family reunifications for 200 families and hoped for more regular events on a larger scale. Two NGOs spoke during the second segment: Conscience and Peace Tax International and the World Evangelical Alliance. The former called on the Human Rights Council to convene a peaceful settlement conference as stipulated in the armistice agreement 62 years ago. The World Evangelical Alliance noted UN reports on food insecurity and stunting of children that call for monitoring of distribution. North Korea’s four churches in Pyongyang are severely constrained, and North Koreans are punished for possessing bibles. The same organization pleaded that China should reconsider its practice of refoulement of fleeing North Koreans.

In their final comments, the panel members provided some key points for considering future strategies on North Korean human rights. The Special Rapporteur announced that in the coming days there would be more information forthcoming about the follow-up on the COI’s recommendation to establish a contact group as well as the group’s composition and other details. According to Mr. Darusman, this contact group would be able to address the problem that no action is taken on North Korean human rights between sessions of the Human Rights Council. On the question of what OHCHR’s field-based mechanism could accomplish, he alluded to the need to re-establish exact figures of Japanese and South Korean abductees following new findings which needed corroboration. David Hawk explained that the usual avenues to address human rights are not available in North Korea as there is no civil society, independent press, indigenous human rights defenders, or ability of people to regularly communicate by phone with those outside North Korea; this leaves only expressions of concern by the international community as an available mechanism. He recommended continuing to press Pyongyang for dialogue with the Special Rapporteur and the High Commissioner—with the contact group as a significant potential breakthrough—urging UN Member States whose recommendations to North Korea during the UPR had been accepted or noted to follow up with the government, and making efforts to keep North Korean human rights in the spotlight. Koichiro Iizuka mentioned the difficulties of dialogue with North Korea given its ultimately insincere attitude. Michael Kirby closed the panel by suggesting the possibility of separating the issues of abductees and disappeared persons and moving that to a more technical level of discussion. In this respect, forming an aggregate list of families who wish to find family members, as has often been done at the end of wars, might be an interesting step. He reminded the Council of the COI’s recommendation for more people-to-people contacts, possibly involving professionals such as dentists or lawyers.

The panel appears to have provided another channel for bringing attention to the plight of various groups suffering from the ongoing violations of human rights in North Korea. Discomforting scrutiny is one of the few identifiable tools available to the international community for provoking any response from the North Korean authorities on human rights concerns. Likewise, reminders about the need for accountability appear to continue to resonate at the highest level in Pyongyang. The High Commissioner alluded in his oral update on the field-based mechanism in Seoul, which followed the panel discussion, to the potentially constructive role that the Seoul office could play beyond continuing its documentation and advocacy work. He further said that office staff are broadening contact with civil society in the region, as there are regional implications of the human rights situation in North Korea. It falls within the office’s mandate to strengthen monitoring and documentation, maintain visibility of the issue, and enhance engagement and capacity building of governments of all states concerned, civil society, and other stakeholders.

Nevertheless, this point highlights what was left unsaid by panelists and diplomats in the Human Rights Council this week: that China remains a key link to any resolution of the situation of gross and systematic human rights violations in North Korea. Only civil society representatives raised the problem of refoulement by China and China’s complicity in the crimes that are committed against those North Koreans who are severely punished for attempting to escape the country. In fact, China’s role in enabling North Korea’s draconian control over its population goes beyond its own failure to respect international human rights and refugee conventions and is the subject for a longer discussion. The COI broke new ground when it named China in its report rather than referring to it as a neighboring state as had been the practice within the United Nations. As numerous speakers and the panelists themselves highlighted the urgency of addressing the human rights situation in North Korea, the international community needs to regard the regional dimensions of not only the problem but also the solution.

Read More

Categories: news

Images of Flood Damage in Rason

By Raymond Ha, HRNK Outreach Coordinator

On August 22–23, the Rajin-Sonbong (Rason) special economic zone in the northeastern region of North Korea suffered torrential downpours, resulting in widespread flooding. Radio Free Asia has reported that “more than 40 people are believed to have lost their lives…while 1,000 homes have likely been damaged.” [1] Pyongyang has appealed for international aid, and the IFRC, WFP, and organizations in Germany and the United Kingdom are assessing or considering the provision of emergency aid. [2]

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has obtained recent images of flood damage in Rason, courtesy of Mr. Jung Gwang-Il, the founder and executive director of No Chain: The Association of North Korean Political Victims and Their Families. Mr. Jung, a survivor of political prison camp no. 15, is a key witness and contributor to HRNK’s upcoming report Hidden Gulag IV: Gender Repression & Prisoner Disappearances, which will be launched on Friday, September 18.

This photograph appears to show a kindergarten in Rason. 

The red text on the banner above the doorway reads “Thank you, Dear General Kim Jong-un.” 

The six letters in the foreground, written on the lower fence, reads “We are happy.”

A flooded street in Rason.
The red sign on the right side of the picture reads "Self-reliant nature."

A resident clears debris on the street.

[1] “Global NGO To Redistribute Flood Aid in North Korea’s Rason,” Radio Free Asia, 02 September 2015. http://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/global-ngo-to-redistribute-flood-aid-in-north-koreas-rason-09022015160842.html.

[2] Lee Bong-Seok, “국제사회, 앞다퉈 북한 홍수 피해 지원 나서,” Yonhap News, 03 September 2015. http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2015/09/03/0200000000AKR20150903025900014.HTML?input=1195m.

Read More

Categories: news