Human Rights Abuses of North Korea

 

The Crimes of Communism: Human Rights Abuses of North Korea

 

 

Written By- Areeka Khan

BA Philosophy

Sophia College for Women, Mumbai

 

Edited by – Muskan Prasad

3^rd Year, B.A.LL.B(HONS)

Amity Law School, Noida

 

North Korea has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).  Despite being bound by these treaties, North Korea's regime is notorious for breaking them.

The 2014 Report of the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded, after extensive investigation, that "the North Korean government systematically violated human rights including freedom of thought, expression, and religion; freedom from discrimination; freedom of movement and residence; and the right to food." It also concluded that, with the exception of apartheid, the North Korean government had committed all crimes against humanity listed in Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The government categorically denies any involvement in the mistreatment of its citizens and refuses to comply with international human rights standards. The Report, however, is thoroughly documented and offers sufficient proof of the North Korean government's ongoing transgressions of international human rights law. According to the report, the North Korean government has committed atrocities on par with those carried out by the Nazis, the apartheid government of South Africa, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

This is not an exaggeration. The North Korean regime is to blame for the most heinous crimes against humanity. Through a system of seclusion, indoctrination, and brutal repression, the North Korean regime has robbed its people of their power and potential to maintain control. Decades of subtle and coercive authoritarian control have kept North Korea's current political structure in place but advances in media technology and information flow are challenging the Kim Dynasty's hermetic structure.

 

Information Control and Permanent Ideological Barrage

“The only truth in North Korea is what is said and what is told by Kim Il Sung, and Kim Jong Il. If Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il said something is white, even if it is black, we have to accept it as the truth, as white. . . Even if what we read was not the truth, we were more than prepared to say it was the truth.”

-          For ten years, prior to defecting, Jeong Jin Hwa was a TV announcer in North Korea.

 

In their book The Hidden People of North Korea, authors Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh describe North Korea as "propaganda-rich, information-poor." According to them, North Koreans live in two distinct information environments. One, which they try to ignore as much as they can, is the public atmosphere under the regime, where they are subjected to lifelong propaganda and where all information is rife with fabrications. The second is the environment of secret information, which includes news and entertainment that slips into North Korea from the outside world.

The only role of the media in a communist nation is to indoctrinate citizens with a fierce loyalty to the ruling party. The North Korean government has never been reluctant to admit that the main purpose of its media is indoctrination. Nodong Sinmun, the main party newspaper, calls the media a "sharp ideological weapon dedicated to staunchly defending and safeguarding the leader" and urges it to "dye the whole society one color, the color of the revolutionary ideology of the great leader."

Even though Article 67 of the North Korean constitution guarantees freedom of the press, publication, assembly, demonstration, and association, the Committee to Protect Journalists lists North Korea as one of the countries with the strictest media restrictions. It has been described as the "most closed media environment in the world" by media experts.

The absence of free media fosters conditions that enable socioeconomic catastrophes like famines and crimes against humanity to flourish, as history has amply demonstrated.  When the famine of the 1990s occurred, the North Korean government told the citizens that it was caused by natural disasters and economic sanctions imposed by enemy states. This information was incorrect and misleading. Even though there were floods followed by droughts and some nations were unable to trade with the North, these events could never cause a famine on their own. Instead, several factors including agricultural policies, the decline of socialist trading partners, reliance on Juche ideology for domestic and international affairs, the criminalization of entrepreneurial practices that served as coping mechanisms, and the government's preference for military spending and the defense of state socialism over economic liberalization contributed to the development of this situation.

 

                  

 

North Korea arguably exhibits a level of almost total control over the media, public opinion, and individual expression, unlike any other nation at any time in history. The North Korean government's disregard for fundamental freedom of expression stands unmatched. Accessing, claiming, and defending human rights depend on our daily practices of speaking out in public, participating in debates, questioning authorities, reading censor-free media, and writing and speaking freely. Access to information, especially through open media, supports the protection of rights. Censored media supports Kim and his regime while depriving ordinary North Koreans of information that could help them make important life decisions.

Nonetheless, despite the Kim regime's relentless efforts to limit the information available to its citizens, information control is less effective now. Researchers Jane Kim and Nat Kretchun investigated this quiet information exchange between North Korean citizens due to the influx of foreign media. They claim that in North Korea, illegal media, including movies, music, and radio broadcasts, are widely used.

 

Prison camps, Torture, and Executions

Fearmongering is one method that the North Korean government uses to keep control over its citizens. Under the tyrannical regime of North Korea, arbitrary arrests, unfair prosecution, and torture of inmates render many vulnerable.

The first leader of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, based the prison camps on Soviet gulags, and over the past 60 years, North Korea's prison system has expanded significantly. North Korea maintains two types of long-term prisons. Criminals are sent to the re-education centers, or "gyohwaso," for their crimes, which can include something as minor as stealing food. Prisoners work ten hours or more per day, seven days a week in mines and logging camps for coal, gold, stone, copper, iron, or gypsum. Even though the conditions in the "gyohwaso" prison camps are poor, they are still preferable to those in the "gwalliso" political detention centers.       

North Koreans are subjected to grave human rights violations on a daily basis. These include child labor and the imposition of harsh punishments for "crimes" deemed dangerous to the regime, such as watching South Korean dramas, distributing foreign media content, or attempting to flee the country.

Political dissent or criticism of the regime, expression of ideas at odds with the official ideology, exposure to ideas different from the regimes’ through foreign media, and family ties to an enemy of the state are all "offenses" that can land a North Korean in a prison camp. These punishable offenses are commonly classified as "wrong-doing," "wrong-thinking," "wrong-associating," and "wrong-knowledge," but any offense deemed "anti-state" may result in incarceration or even death.

Torture, forced starvation, and execution await these North Koreans once they are detained. Forced labor and hunger are used to keep prisoners under control. Former inmates and guards who defected claim that the daily prison diet consists of no more than 500 g of corn, potatoes, or cabbage. Rats, snakes, insects, grass, and tree bark were commonly used to supplement this diet.

 

    

 

The North Korean criminal code, like the entire justice system, from judges to juries to lawyers, is a tool of the party. There is usually no fair process for being sent to one of these gulags. People are not informed of the "crimes" they have committed, and are not provided with an attorney or an opportunity to defend themselves because all lawyers work for the state, and there is no requirement for evidence to be presented in any judicial setting. The suspected criminal is merely apprehended, taken to a facility for questioning, and frequently tortured to "confess" before being sent to prison camps.

Unlike the former Soviet Union's gulags, however, in North Korea, not only is the alleged offender imprisoned but up to three generations of their family may also be imprisoned for alleged political offenses. Kim Il-Sung believed that entire families, including children, should be annihilated because of their ties to family members accused of political crimes. He called them "class enemies for three generations" because their "blood is guilty," and he ordered that they be punished and isolated from society, along with the family member who committed the political crime.

In North Korea, public executions are yet another manifestation of the state's intolerance for indiscretion and desire to eliminate it. In North Korea's exercise of state power, a public execution is a profoundly performative gesture. North Korea reportedly conducts about 100 public executions annually, according to the 2013 South Korean Human Rights White Paper. People are detained and sentenced to death for a variety of reasons. Espionage, smuggling, selling narcotics, stealing metal wire, stealing or butchering cattle, murder, Christian worship, distributing South Korean videos, listening to foreign radio, and using Chinese cell phones are among the capital crimes.

Although the Kim Regime still denies the existence of its political prison camps, we know, through satellite imagery and escapee testimony, that these camps exist.

 

Camp 15 is 365 square kilometers and is the most well-documented Kwan-li-so political prison camp in North Korea. In late 2014, satellite photographs of political prison camp No. 15 were made available by HRNK and AllSource Analysis (ASA) report.

 

  

In 2014, At the Kanggon (Gang Gun) Military Training Area, twenty-two kilometers north of Pyongyang, satellite imagery indicates that a spectacular exhibition of public execution took place.

 

“Rape and violent beatings were rampant at the Chongjin holding center. Every night some women would be forced to leave with a guard and be raped... Click, click, click was the most horrible sound I ever heard. It was the sound of the key to the cell of our prison room opening. Every night a prison guard would open the cell. I stood still quietly, acting like I didn’t notice, hoping it wouldn’t be me the one to have to follow the guard, hoping it wouldn’t be him.”

– Yoon Mi Hwa fled North Korea in 2018

 

North Korean officials were asked in 2017 what steps had been taken to address the 2014 findings of the UN Commission of Inquiry that women forcibly returned from China had been abused and tortured. The findings, like other "anti-Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) human rights resolutions" adopted by the UN, were dismissed as "unsubstantiated" and "politicized" by the delegation.

The OHCHR cataloged numerous allegations of beatings, torture, and sexual violations against women who were forcibly repatriated after attempting to flee the country to find work, usually in neighboring China, in a 2020 report. According to KINU's White Paper for 2020, children repatriated from China were subjected to torture, verbal abuse, and violence, including beatings, hard labor, and hunger.

North Korea's People's Safety Enforcement Law (1992), Article 50, clause 3, states that a pregnant woman cannot be detained.  However, according to the testimony of a former commissioner of the Women's Group in North Korea, it is a policy that all pregnant women brought back from China have forced abortions. These abortions are not performed in a hospital or under medical supervision, but rather through beatings and horrific abuse by guards. Various methods are used to coerce these women into having abortions.

Female defectors reported being overseen almost entirely by male officers, contrary to international human rights standards that require women prisoners to be guarded exclusively by female prison staff to prevent sexual violence. Survivors claimed widespread sexual abuse by the secret police (bowiseong) or police interrogators at holding centers (jipkyulso) and pretrial detention and interrogation centers (kuryujang) in the same report.

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Leaving North Korea

 

 

The North Korean government has intensified its efforts since 2019 to restrict its citizens' access to the outside world. North Korean law makes leaving the country without official permission a crime, and those caught attempting to flee are apprehended and punished, including public forms of punishment, imprisonment, and, in extreme cases, death.

Those attempting to flee the country without permission risk being killed on the spot or publicly executed, as any North Korean citizen who leaves the country without permission is subject to a de facto embargo. This is a violation of Article 12 sections 1 and 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a covenant that includes provisions for freedom of movement within as well as into and out of one’s own country, to which North Korea is a signatory.

Legal emigration is not an option for most North Koreans, and to promote the impression that the country is a workers’ paradise, the regime has made it a treasonous offense to leave without permission. Nevertheless, a small number of defectors do voluntarily return to the North to reunite with family or return because they are strongly dissatisfied with life outside North Korea, and a handful undertakes the dangerous mission of returning to bring out remaining family members. However, most defectors return to their homeland only because they are dragged back there.

Most North Koreans attempting to flee the Kim regime's tyranny attempt to enter China. Some stay and others move toward South Korea or other destinations. However, the Chinese government has been harshly prosecuting North Korean escapees, seizing them, and returning them against their will to the North Korean government, where they are subjected to severe punishment. According to the Chinese government, North Koreans are not seeking asylum or refuge, but rather economic opportunities. They are classified as economic migrants by the government. By classifying them as economic migrants, China is failing to meet its obligations under the Refugee Convention to which it is a signatory. According to Article 33 of the Refugee Convention, no contracting state shall expel or return a refugee in any way to the borders of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened due to his race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Deciding to defect is not simple. Family members must be abandoned to the mercy of North Korean police, who will now label them as politically disloyal. Those caught in the act of defecting face arrest, torture, imprisonment, years of hard labor, and, in some cases, death in prison camps.

 

   

 

Since 2019, authorities in China have detained at least 52 North Korean asylum seekers in the provinces of Liaoning, Shandong, Jiangsu, Yunnan, Hebei, and Jilin, as well as the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The punishment and cruel treatment of North Koreans who are repatriated to North Korea is well documented, as evidenced by numerous reports and testimony from those who have survived to flee to China after repatriation. Nonetheless, China ignores the issue of North Korean treatment of returned North Koreans.

 

 

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