The Asian nation has been repeatedly condemned for its human rights abuses and
the new report features firsthand accounts from North Korean refugees. The
Korean Bar Association, based in South Korea, released the new report which is
based in interviews with about 100 North Korean defectors who came to the South
after 2000.
The report shows that North Korean officials frequently jail citizens of the
Asian nation on bogus charges and do not abide by the law when doing so. Some
of the abuses include torture and sexual harassment of female inmates.
In the case of women in prison, 58 percent of the defectors interviewed said
they had seen women be forced to have an abortion or had heard about such
abortions take place.
This is the first time the Bar Association has released a report on North
Korea's human rights record since 1989 when it started monitoring the human
rights record of South Korea.
Lee Kook-jae, a member of the bar association, told the Korea Times, "We
researched North Korea's human rights condition from the legal point of view
for the first time. The world should make efforts to improve human rights
there."
In March, a doctor who defected form Communist-controlled North Korea told a
human rights panel that few disabled people are living in the Asian nation
because physicians kill any newborn babies with physical disabilities shortly
after birth.
Ri Kwang-ch told the panel that infanticide of disabled babies is widespread,
but said he didn't participate in the practice before fleeing the country last
year.
"There are no people with physical defects in North Korea," Ri told members of
the New Right Union, a group that partners human rights activists with North
Korean refugees.
According to a Reuters report, Ri said disabled babies were killed in hospitals
or homes and quickly buried. He indicated the North Korean government
encourages the practice to "purify" its population and get rid of people who
are "different."
During emotional testimony in Seoul last year, a woman named Kim Chun Ae
described the horrors of life in a North Korean prison. She said authorities
there "forced a woman who was eight months pregnant to have an abortion just
because the father of the baby was Chinese."
She also said that a number of girls are sold to traffickers as sex slaves.
It's a situation that could leave young women especially vulnerable to
abortion.
"I remember crying when I thought of a 12-year-old girl who was sold to
traffickers. Children at her age need care and protection from their parents.
But they are sold to traffickers and forced to live as sex slaves. Girls aged
17 to 19 were sold in one place, to be resold to other places by traffickers,"
Kim said.
An early 2005 U.S. State Department report on conditions in North Korea stated,
"The [government of North Korea's] human rights record remained extremely poor,
and it continued to commit numerous serious abuses."
The Bush Administration report added, "Defectors have reported that government
officials prohibit live births in prison."
"Prison conditions were harsh and life-threatening, and torture reportedly was
common," the report explained. "Pregnant female prisoners reportedly underwent
forced abortions, and in other cases babies reportedly were killed upon birth
in prisons."
North Korea officials also torture women from China who are fleeing that Asian
nation to escape its coercive one-child policy that has resulted in similar
forced abortions, forced sterilizations and imprisonment.
The report said prison officials force mothers recently repatriated from China
to watch the infanticide of their newly born infants.
"According to defectors who were imprisoned in the 1990s, in cases of live
birth, the child was immediately killed," the State Department report revealed.
"[T]he reason given for this policy was to prevent the birth of half-Chinese
children."
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