On November 4, the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific held a hearing on human rights issues in North Korea.
In his opening statement, Chair Sam Brownback (R-KS) summarized the human rights situation in North Korea. “According to the…U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, hundreds of thousands have died of starvation and oppression while others continue to languish in their gulags [prison camps],” he stated. Sen. Brownback also announced his intention to introduce legislation before the end of the congressional session to promote freedom and democracy in North Korea and to protect the North Korean refugees who have fled to China.
David Hawk, author of The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps, explained that eyewitness accounts and satellite photographs prove the existence of political forced labor camps and prison camps in North Korea, although the North Korean government continues to deny their existence. He said that many of the political prisoners have not undergone any judicial process and have no set term sentences. Mr. Hawk also highlighted the human rights conditions within these facilities. “Each of these different prison-slave labor camps, prisons, and detention facilities are characterized by extreme phenomena of repression: life-time imprisonment and guilt by association, up to three generations in the kwan-li-so [political camps]; forced abortion and ethnic infanticide in the provincial detention centers along the North Korea-Chinese border; the practice of torture and extremely high rates of deaths-in-detention from combinations of forced labor and below subsistence food rations permeate the prison and camps system at all levels,” he stated.
Testifying on behalf of Amnesty International, T. Kumar said that, in general, it was difficult to list all of the human rights violations in North Korea because the government restricts access to most independent human rights monitors. One issue of major concern is the high number of North Koreans who suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Mr. Kumar cited a UN Food and Agricultural Organization study indicating that 13 million people in North Korea, over half of the population, suffered from malnutrition. “The situation remains especially precarious for young children, pregnant and nursing women, and elderly people,” he stated. Mr. Kumar argued that the United States should encourage North Korea to invite experts from the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to “examine conditions generally [in North Korea] and also focus on children and pregnant and nursing women who have been identified by UN agencies as vulnerable groups badly affected by the food shortages.” He further added that North Korea should “provide these experts with unimpeded access to prisons or detention centers for juvenile detainees and women detainees.”
Joel Charny of Refugees International testified on the status of North Korean refugees in China. He explained that these refugees are treated as economic refugees by China and are typically sent back to North Korea where they are subject to “special” persecution. Mr. Charny indicated that many women try to find a Korean-Chinese husband in China in order to avoid deportation. “The problem,” he stated, “is that these women are vulnerable to unscrupulous traffickers who pose as honest brokers for Chinese men…Women, some of whom have a husband and children in North Korea, willingly offer themselves to gangs along the border who sell them to Chinese men. These women see this as their only option for survival.” Mr. Charny also said that women who succeed in marrying a Korean-Chinese man are unable to obtain legal residency in China. In addition, their children are “stateless” and unable to get a formal education.
