UN says abuses persist in North Korea
A decade after a landmark UN report concluded North Korea committed crimes against humanity, a UN official investigating rights in the isolated state said many abuses continue, exacerbated by COVID-era controls that have yet to be lifted.
James Heenan, who represents the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, said he is still surprised by the continued prevalence of executions, forced labour, and reports of starvation in the authoritarian country.
Later this year Heenan's team will release a follow-up report to the 2014 findings by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which said the government had committed "systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations" that constituted crimes against humanity.
While the conclusions of this year's report are still being finalized, Heenan said in an interview that the last 10 years have seen mixed results, with North Korea's government engaging more with some international institutions, but doubling down on control at home.
"The post-COVID period for DPRK means a period of much greater government control over people's lives and restrictions on their freedoms," he said.
An investigation in 2023 found leader Kim Jong Un had spent much of the COVID pandemic building a massive string of walls and fences along the previously porous border with China, and later built fences around the capital of Pyongyang.
A report this week by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said the COVID pandemic raged in North Korea for more than two years before the regime admitted in May 2022 that the virus had permeated its borders, and that the regime bungled the response in a way that violated freedoms and left most citizens to fend for themselves.
While human rights has traditionally been a politically volatile subject not only for Pyongyang but for foreign governments trying to engage with the nuclear-armed North, Heenan said the issues like prison camps need to be part of any engagement on a political settlement.
