North Korea has captured the world’s attention for decades of threatening rhetoric, which in recent years has reached new levels of concern as the North accelerates its nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile capacities.
The recent alarm stems from the danger the dictatorship now poses to the world at large through its rapidly growing weapons programs. We should continue to condemn North Korea for these aggressive moves, of course, but it’s worth taking the time to also note their crimes against humanity, which often take a back seat to military threat.
The International Bar Association (IBA) War Crimes Committee published a new report this month titled Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity in North Korean Political Prison Camps. According to the IBA, North Korean detention camps holds between 80,000-130,000 “class enemies,” many of whom are simply family members of those accused of state “crimes.”
The report says that a number of war crimes are committed against political prisoners at North Korea’s prisoner camps, including slavery, torture, sexual abuse, and “disappearances.”
The report further recommends the international community “punish and remedy the crimes against humanity chronicled by this Inquiry, and further calls on the international community to advocate for the UN to take such action.”
From the report’s brief synopsis:
This Inquiry finds evidence that ten of the eleven crimes against humanity enumerated in the Rome Statute of the ICC adopted on 17 July 1998 (“Rome Statute”) have been, and continue to be, committed with only the crime of apartheid deemed inapplicable. The ten relevant crimes are: (1) murder; (2) extermination; (3) enslavement; (4) forcible transfer; (5) imprisonment; (6) torture; (7) sexual violence; (8) persecution; (9) enforced disappearances; and (10) other inhumane acts. Based on the evidence presented and reviewed, this Inquiry concludes that there are several classes of individuals who may be subject to prosecution for some or all of the above referenced crimes, including: Kim Jongun in his capacity as Head of State; members of the Korean Workers’ Party and the State Affairs Commission; and members of the State Security Department, including State Security Department Officers, State Security Department Agents, and Prison Guards, who, together, help administer North Korea’s political prisons.
The legal basis for holding the above defendants liable for crimes against humanity may include their participation in a “joint criminal enterprise” or a finding of “command responsibility,” the latter a long-established form of liability under customary international law that holds superiors responsible for the criminal actsof their subordinates.Recommendations: This Inquiry calls upon the UN to provide the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) or a special international tribunal with jurisdiction to appropriately investigate, punish and remedy the crimes against humanity chronicled by this Inquiry, and further calls on the international community to advocate for the UN to take such action. Other recommendations include a call for: North Korea to dismantle its political prison system; third-party states to exercise universal jurisdiction over regime officials where warranted; targeted sanctions against persons responsible for past or ongoing crimes against humanity in North Korea’s political prisons and beyond; and a ban on the importation of products made with materials or labor from North Korea’s penal system.
Three international judges, Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay, Thomas Buergenthal and Mark B Harmon, authored the report.
“The conditions in the Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps,” Buergenthal, who survived Auschwitz, told the Washington Post.
Vox reports:
Here are a few quotes from the report that show in excruciating detail what life in these camps is like, according to the defectors the authors interviewed.
[Warning: the following descriptions are extremely disturbing]
- “Rape of teenage girls and their subsequent attempts to commit suicide by jumping in the Daedonggang River were so common that prison guards were deployed to the river to thwart them.”
- “A soldier supervising a forced labor site at a political prison rolled a log down a steep mountainside, killing ten prisoners as they were carrying logs up the mountain.”
- “A former prison guard witnessed a prisoner’s newborn baby, most likely fathered by a high-ranking official, fed to guard dogs and killed.”
Other sections of the report detail a female prisoner being raped and violated by a wooden stick, and prisoners desperately searching for edible plants on the side of a mountain being shot and killed by their guards.
These are not isolated incidents. Atrocities like mass rape and indiscriminate killings are the point of North Korea’s prison camps: to degrade and terrify the population into submission to Kim Jong Un’s regime. These camps have been around for decades; the report estimates that “hundreds of thousands” of people have been killed in them.
The report concludes by analyzing international law concerning crimes against humanity. It finds that the Kim regime has committed 10 different such crimes, and that there is more than enough evidence to charge Kim himself in the International Criminal Court.
The problem, obviously is that North Korea has at least a 1.2 million man army, nuclear weapons, and quickly advancing missile range.
They know full well the size and scope of their oppressive regime, and have built up the military means to maintain it, as well as regularly announcing a lunatic rhetoric that ought to discourage any outside effort at diminishing the state leadership’s power over its long-suffering populace.
from The Federalist Papers http://bitly.com/2BiLq1h
via IFTTT Chilling Report: North Korean Prisons Are as “Terrible as Nazi Camps” http://bitly.com/2BiLq1h