The number of political prisoners in North Korea's concentration camps, known as kwanliso , is falling. Down to between 80,000 and 120,000. But not because the brutal Stalinist state is relaxing its iron grip on its people. Because its prisoners are dying off. Hundreds of thousands are believed to have starved to death or been killed in the camps.
The regime's atrocities are "strikingly similar" to those of the Nazis, a United Nations commission chaired by Australian jurist Michael Kirby reported. "The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world." It recommends prosecution at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity of the state and senior officials, including leader Kim Jong Un.
The UN Security Council may – and should – start the process but it requires unanimity, an unlikely prospect as China has in the past blocked any moves to reprimand its neighbour and client. The commission which was barred from visiting North Korea, took harrowing evidence over the course of a year from several hundred exiled refugees and defectors.
The report also sharply criticises China for abetting the abuses of those fleeing Pyonyang and their repatriation to internment camps, torture and death. Women found by the Chinese and repatriated often have their babies killed by authorities in North Korea to prevent mixed-race children, the report says. One witness reported seeing a female prisoner forced to drown her newborn baby because it was presumed to have a Chinese father.
North Korea’s crimes include “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence,” and “an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”. The tragedy is that this important report may do little more than expose the ultimate toothlessness of the UN in the face of such a regime. Must we resign ourselves to that reality?