The National Human Rights Commission of Korea held an event yesterday to celebrate one year of its department accepting reports of human rights abuses in North Korea.

To celebrate while also keeping up the fight, the event featured testimony from North Korean defectors themselves.

Miss A, who was repatriated twice by the National Security Agency in 2003 and 2004 testified, “The security agents conducted various tortures on repatriated defectors, some in front of their children like sexually humiliating body searches, plus forced abortions and other inhumane acts.”

She went on, “Five or six men in their mid 20s undressed us, and then told us to put our hands over our heads and sit up and down repeatedly. They touched groins and examined us from head to toe. Children were stood watching their mothers being inspected all over.”
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She continued, “Younger girls who resisted out of shyness were beaten. Through body searches everything valuable was taken from us.”

“If we had gotten pregnant in China a liquid solution called ‘ribanol’ was injected into the baby’s head in the stomach. If that child was born alive it was put into a bucket and poured out under the grape vine in the front yard. I am sure you will find many baby corpses if you dig the ground in that area.”

In 2004, Mr B, who was imprisoned at a reeducation camp for smuggling, said, “I suffered pain that wore me out.”

▲ Defector illustration of North Korean torture in prison camps (©National Human Rights Commission of Korea)

He testified, “During the course of the investigation the trial personnel beat me for not confessing and hung me out of a window until I fainted.”

Bob also testified to the poor conditions in the camp; starvation, poor sanitary conditions and deaths due to forced labor. The North Korean authorities burn the bodies and use then as fertilizer, he claimed.

81 different cases of human rights violations similar to this were received from 834 people by the center in its first year.