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U.N. Panel Finds Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea U.N. Panel Finds Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea
(about 3 hours later)
WASHINGTON — A United Nations panel has found that crimes against humanity have been committed in North Korea and will call for an international criminal investigation, according to people familiar with the panel’s conclusions. GENEVA — United Nations investigators say North Korea has committed wide-ranging crimes against humanity to sustain its political system, and recommend that it be referred to the International Criminal Court.
The panel’s report, to be released Monday, is the most authoritative account yet of human rights violations by North Korean authorities. In a report that draws on the testimony of survivors and those who escaped the country, the investigators detail how North Koreans have been summarily executed and subjected to rape, forced abortions and enslavement, and suffered persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, The Associated Press said on Saturday, citing an unofficial outline of the report, scheduled to be released Monday.
After a yearlong investigation, the panel said it found evidence of an array of offenses, including crimes against humanity carried out through executions and starvation as well as a campaign of abductions of people in South Korea and Japan. Crimes against humanity were committed through policies and decisions meant to sustain the present political system, the report concludes, and in full awareness that they would exacerbate starvation and related deaths, the news agency reported.
The report does not examine in detail individual responsibility for the crimes, but it recommends steps toward accountability. It could also build international pressure on North Korea, whose dire rights record has drawn less censure at the United Nations than its nuclear and missile programs have. The panel is scheduled to present its report and a 372-page detailed annex to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 17. The report is widely expected to be the most authoritative account yet of the abuses and repression maintained by three generations of the ruling Kim family over 60 years.
But North Korea’s main ally, China, would be likely to block any referral of the case to the International Criminal Court. The Human Rights Council set up the panel nearly a year ago to try to broaden international attention beyond North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and focus on a system of political repression that the United Nations human rights chief, Navi Pillay, said had “allowed the government to mistreat its citizens to a degree that should be unthinkable in the 21st century.”
A spokesman for North Korea’s United Nations Mission in New York who refused to give his name said: “We totally reject the unfounded findings of the Commission of Inquiry regarding crimes against humanity. We will never accept that.” There appears to be little prospect of North Korea’s coming under investigation by the International Criminal Court, an initiative that requires the support of the United Nations Security Council, where China, North Korea’s traditional ally, would almost certainly block action.
An outline of the report’s conclusions was provided by a person familiar with its contents who was not authorized to divulge the information before its formal release and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. An American official, speaking anonymously for the same reason, confirmed the main conclusions. Members of the panel are under no illusion about the political obstacles to bringing the North’s leaders to account for the crimes they report, but have expressed the hope that greater international scrutiny will have a deterrent effect on state abuse, afford some protection to North Korea’s s population and help serve as a catalyst for change.
The three-member commission, led by a retired Australian judge, Michael D. Kirby, was set up by the United Nations’ top human rights body last March to investigate evidence of systematic and grave rights violations in North Korea, which is notorious for its political prisons camps, repression and a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the 1990s. David Hawk, a leading researcher on North Korean prison camps, told The A.P. that although legal scholars and human rights groups had previously concluded that North Korea had committed crimes against humanity, this was the first time that United Nations experts had drawn the same conclusion.
The commission conducted public hearings with more than 80 victims, defectors and other witnesses in Seoul, South Korea, Tokyo, London and Washington but was not allowed into North Korea. The panel draws on the testimony of survivors, expert witnesses and satellite imagery to describe the conditions in a network of prison camps still believed to hold up to 120,000 prisoners, where inmates, some of them sentenced for “crimes by association,” were subjected to forced labor and deliberate starvation, and witnessed frequent public executions.
The report concludes that the testimony and other information it received offered grounds “to merit a criminal investigation by a competent national or international organ of justice.” Barred from access to North Korea, the panel held public hearings in Tokyo, London, San Francisco and Seoul, South Korea, to help raise awareness of conditions in the country. These produced harrowing accounts of starving children clubbed to death by prison guards for stealing a few grains of rice and a mother who was forced to drown her baby in a bucket.
David Hawk, a former United Nations human rights official and a leading researcher on North Korean prison camps, said that legal scholars, human rights lawyers and nongovernment groups had previously concluded that crimes against humanity had been committed but that this would be the first time experts authorized by United Nations member states had made that determination. “We heard from ordinary people who faced torture and imprisonment for doing nothing more than watching foreign soap operas or holding a religious belief,” the leader of the panel, Michael D. Kirby, told the Human Rights Council in September.
The commission will formally present its findings to the United Nations Human Rights Council on March 17.
Testimony by North Korean defectors at last year’s hearings produced chilling accounts of systematic rape, murder and torture as well as suffering during the famine of the late ’90s.
The report refers to murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortion, sexual violence and forced disappearances, and persecution on political and religious grounds. It also cites the overall system of political repression, a classification system that discriminates against North Koreans on the basis of their families’ perceived loyalty to the government and forced labor in the North’s gulag.