North Korea's regime has committed crimes as chilling as those of the Nazis, South Africa's apartheid regime or Cambodia's Khmer Rouge and must be stopped, the head of a UN inquiry said on Monday. "Contending with the great scourges of Nazism, apartheid, the Khmer Rouge and other affronts required courage by great nations and ordinary human beings alike," Michael Kirby told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
"It is now your solemn duty to address the scourge of human rights violations and crimes against humanity in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," he said. His comments followed a searing 400-page report, released last month, that documented a range of gross human rights abuses in the country, including extermination, enslavement and sexual violence.
"The gravity, scale, duration and nature of the unspeakable atrocities committed in the country reveal a totalitarian state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world," said Kirby, a retired Australian judge. The report insisted North Korea's leaders should answer for a litany of crimes against humanity before an international court. "The world has ignored the evidence for too long," Kirby insisted, adding: "There is no excuse, because now we know." North Korea, which refused to cooperate with the commission, has "categorically" rejected the report.
Its representative to the UN, So Se Pyong, slammed the findings as "shameless fabrications" by "the United States and other hostile forces". The commission, created in March 2013 by the Human Rights Council, was denied access to North Korea and relied on hearings in South Korea and Japan with 320 North Korean exiles. The report condemned a widespread system of throwing generations of the same family into prison camps under guilt-by-association rules. On Monday, Kirby showed footage from the hearings, including of survivor Shin Dong-hyuk who was born into a prison camp and spent his first 23 years there. The 31-year-old says he was tortured, subjected to forced labour and compelled to witness the execution of his mother and brother at the age of 13.
Former prisoner Jee Heon-a can also be seen in the footage describing how she had witnessed a security guard beat a mother until she agreed to drown her new-born baby. "The baby stopped crying (and) we saw bubbles rising up," she recalled. North Korea is estimated to have 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners, while hundreds of thousands more are believed to have perished in the camps over the past half century, "through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture," the report said. "If this report does not give rise to action, it is difficult to imagine what will," Kirby insisted. The report also estimated 200,000 people from other countries had been abducted - mostly South Koreans left stranded after the 1950-1953 Korean War, but also hundreds from around the world since then.
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