The United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Human Rights in North Korea made its final report public yesterday, detailing “systematic, widespread, and gross human rights violations” against the North Korean people that have “no parallel in the contemporary world.”
Tasked with investigating mounting claims of state-initiated human rights abuses, the commission report follows a total of 80 public hearings in Asia, Europe and the United States since its establishment in March 2013. A further 240 confidential interviews and written submissions from UN member states and organizations has revealed systematic violations of freedom of thought and the right to food, abductions of foreign nationals, and arbitrary detention, torture and execution.
The principal findings describe the North Korean state as an “all-encompassing indoctrination machine,” demanding obedience to the Supreme Leader and maintaining an “absolute monopoly over information and total control of organized social life.” Enforced disappearances and detention in a political prison camp await those who are charged with a political crime. Inmates at such camps are thought to be systematically eliminated through “deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights.”
Denied the opportunity to collectively advocate for their rights, women continue to be marginalized and many suffer sexual violence. In terms of class discrimination, at least, the Songbun classification system assigned to an individual at birth is said to be losing its grip as the result of grassroots marketization and the increasing flow of foreign currency within the North.
In releasing the report, former Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby urged the international community to take action in the face of overwhelming evidence that the North Korean regime continues to violate the human rights of its citizens. The COI further requested that UN member states, including China, “abstain from forcibly repatriating any persons” back to North Korea.
