 |
| UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay [FILE PHOTO: UNifeed] |
Geneva: The U.N.’s top human rights official is calling for an
international inquiry into what she calls the "deplorable human rights
situation" in North Korea. The high
commissioner says the elaborate network of political prison camps, forced labor
and torture in the country cannot be allowed to continue.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay says
initial hopes that North Korea’s new young leader Kim Jong Un would bring about
some positive change in the country’s human rights situation have not
occurred.
No improvement
She says the country shows almost no sign of improvement and
the elaborate network of political prison camps and the atrocious treatment of
the inmates remains in place. She says
she is concerned by the international community’s single-minded focus on North
Korea’s nuclear program and periodic rocket launches, which deflects attention
away from the country’s dire human rights situation.
Pillay’s spokesman, Rupert Colville, says nobody knows for
sure how many prisoners are in the political prison camps or even how many
camps there are. He says the only
information available is obtained from prisoners who have escaped.
“It is believed, but it is a very, very rough estimate that
perhaps around 200,000 people are kept in these camps. Some of them are born there," Colville
says. "So, you are sort of punished from birth, very often for something
your grandfather did. And, the stories
from the people who have escaped are really harrowing, awful situations. There is no parallel really anywhere else in
the world.”
Colville says the high commissioner met with two survivors
of North Korea’s prison system before Christmas. He says they described a system of
unspeakable cruelty. He says people are
subject to rampant violations, including torture, summary executions, rape,
slave labor, and forms of collective punishment that may amount to crimes
against humanity.
Colville tells reporters living conditions in the camps are
atrocious. He says people do not get
enough to eat, there is little or no medical care and no adequate
clothing. Colville says entire families
are punished for reasons unknown to them.
He says babies are born in prison.
They grow up there and know no other life.
“And, that is also alarming.
The distortion of reality that goes on in there. So people think it is
perfectly normal to report on your own family and then watch your own family
being executed as a result of your own words," he explains. "And,
that was a situation described by one of the people the High Commissioner
met.
He actually was forced to watch the
execution of his mother and his brother and they were executed because of
something he said. He, a child at the
time said they had been saying.”
High Commissioner Pillay says it is time the international
community takes a much firmer step towards applying serious pressure to bring
about change for North Korea’s beleaguered, subjugated population of 20 million
people.
She says an in-depth inquiry into one of the worst, but
least understood and reported, human rights situations in the world is fully
justified and long overdue.
The U.N. Human Rights Office gave a copy of High Commissioner
Pillay’s report to North Korea’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva. So far, it has received no response.
-VOA