The UN’s new report exposes his regime’s murderous grip over North Korea and its people
By Benedict Rogers in UCA News
Earlier this month, the United Nations woke from its slumber over North Korea’s human rights crisis — and published a depressing, damning indictment on Kim Jong-un’s record of repression over the past decade.
The report — a required update to the historically unprecedented UN commission of inquiry report in 2014 — examines the past decade in North Korea. It draws on interviews with 314 victims and witnesses who have left the country during that period, as well as expertise from civil society organizations and other specialists.
Damningly, it concludes that a decade after the UN’s inquiry, the Pyongyang regime maintains a level of control over “all aspects of citizens’ lives” that is “the most absolute in decades.” In layman’s language, North Korea has increased rather than diminished its totalitarian control over its citizens in the last decade.
The UN’s new report concludes that surveillance technology has assisted Kim Jong-un’s increased control, along with a flurry of new laws that his regime has unleashed, providing for a “legal framework for repression.”
International sanctions — which, as long as they are targeted at Kim Jong-un and his dictatorship — are absolutely justified. They have, nonetheless, deepened North Korea’s isolation, the UN claims.
The Covid-19 pandemic helped the regime accelerate this isolation, giving it the excuse to close the borders and stop people from leaving and information from arriving. “The State has not returned to the pre-pandemic levels of interaction with the outside world,” the UN report notes.
The totalitarian levels of control over its citizens and information even allowed the regime to deceive the world that it had escaped the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic with its draconian closures and restrictions — a “miracle” claim which took scientists and researchers years to debunk.
In fact, North Korea “left many of its citizens to die from Covid-19 without proper health care or access to outside help.”
Military spending in North Korea has now hit over 15 percent of the national budget — making North Korea an increasingly armed threat to the world and an increasingly impoverished powder-keg.
On top of all this, North Korea is continuing to send soldiers to fight Vladimir Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine and is providing Russia with munitions. Russia is repaying the favor by helping North Korea with nuclear ballistic missile technology, which will soon bring much of the world within reach of its nuclear weapons.
In 2011 — almost exactly 14 years ago — I helped, with others, to establish the International Coalition to Stop Crimes against Humanity in North Korea, launched in Tokyo, to advocate for the establishment of a UN Commission of Inquiry.
Less than two years later, the UN did exactly that — and the naysayers who told us we were wasting our time fell silent.
That commission of inquiry was one of the most powerful human rights investigations of recent times. Chaired by Australian judge Justice Michael Kirby, it produced a comprehensive, conclusive, damning litany of horrors in North Korea, which, without doubt, amount to crimes against humanity, exposing an utterly depraved and totalitarian state.
More than a decade on, the UN has reviewed what, if anything, has changed. Tragically, very little has.
If anything, the situation has worsened as North Korea has increased its murderous grip of control over its people in the face of international inaction.
According to the UN, “over the past ten years, the government continued to exercise total control over the population and severely restrict the enjoyment of fundamental rights and freedoms.”
A whole raft of new laws over the last decade — which the UN details — has resulted in more North Koreans in jail and further repression.
Crucially, public executions have increased, and “crackdowns against foreign information” have intensified since 2018, and became harsher since 2020, “resulting in several public executions.”
Most of all, more people are being executed just for watching foreign films or television.
And while the use of mobile phones has increased, the level of censorship and interception has risen too.
The violations against women and girls — especially through trafficking for forced marriage and “sexual exploitation” — have increased.
And the crackdown on religious activity has also continued. In 2018, for example, a man in South Hamgyong province was sentenced to life imprisonment for identifying shamanism burial sites. Contact with foreign Christians is very severely punished.
The latest UN report on North Korea is a fundamental wake-up call.
A decade ago, the UN commission of inquiry called for accountability. It reported stunningly brutal and widespread crimes against humanity, and called for international action.
A decade on, it is clear that the UN, member states, and civil society have squandered this opportunity, wasted these years, and failed to build on the courageous work of the UN Commission of Inquiry, which I and others worked so hard to achieve.
The challenge now — to governments, to civil society, and to the UN — is: what now?
More reports? More testimonials?
Those are always important and welcome.
But in the face of such incontrovertible evidence of extreme brutality and repression — in the world’s most repressive state, described repeatedly by the UN as sui generis (in a category of its own) — why is there still so little action to end the repression and bring about accountability for these stunning crimes?
Kim Jong-un should be in the dock, on trial, not hanging out with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and other dictators as he did recently in a dictator-fest in Beijing.
The world has a responsibility to act upon the UN’s own recommendations and on the testimonies of so many brave escapees. The international community must establish a mechanism to hold Kim Jong-un to account for his crimes — through the UN system if possible, or outside it if necessary.
Failure to act, as the world has done in the last decade since the first UN report, only emboldens impunity — and empowers the dictators. The latest UN report deserves to be read, alongside the original commission of inquiry report, not as historical research or an academic study, but as a manifesto for action — and then acted upon.
This article was originally published in UCA News.