The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps
Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photographs
PART FOUR
RECOMMENDATIONS
To the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korea should proceed to implement, without further delay, the recommendations made to it by the U.N. Human Rights Committee in July 2001 (CCPR/CO/72/PRK) and by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in April 2003 (E/CN.4/2003/L.31/Rev.1) reprinted in the appendices to this report.
To the People’s Republic of China
The People’s Republic of China should stop repatriating North Koreans, even if it regards them as illegal immigrants (rather than refugees sur place, those individuals who, because of the person’s own actions or as a result of circumstances that have developed in the country of origin during the person’s absence, cannot safely return to that country). Although it might have been the famine that drove North Koreans into China for food (or to find work to buy food for their families back home), the brutal interrogations, torture, and forced-labor detention systems and the dire punishments for those who are returned makes the refugees “political,” until it can be independently verified that North Korean abuse of repatriated Koreans has ceased.
It would be preferable for China to allow the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) access to North Koreans in China and for China to enable the UNHCR to extend its concern and care to those North Koreans who possess a wellfounded fear of persecution if returned to their country of origin. But until China is prepared to take that step, it should simply ignore the North Koreans in northeast China, who are suffering from the food shortage and persecution. These North Koreans’ needs can be tended to by humanitarian NGOs, until the food situation in North Korea stabilizes and its human rights situation has substantially improved.
To the Republic of Korea
South Korea should (continue to) grant asylum to North Korean refugees who reach its embassies and consulates abroad. South Korea should not exclude human rights matters from its otherwise multifaceted dialogue with North Korea; and should support international efforts to address the human rights situation in North Korea, such as the North Korea resolution at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
To Other Member States of the International Community
Neighboring and other nation-states face a series of interlocking and unresolved disputes with North Korea. These include extremely serious security issues revolving around North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, and the conventional military face-off at the DMZ separating North and South Korea. These disputes, inevitably, also involve humanitarian issues, such as North Korea’s continuing need for international food aid to keep renewed famine at bay, family-reunification visits between North and South Koreans, and accounting for South Korean and Japanese citizens previously kidnapped by North Korea. If and when negotiations on the problem of North Korea’s nuclear proliferation and other security issues should advance toward an agreement, the human rights situation in North Korea should also be addressed, particularly if North Korea would receive significant economic aid as part of the nuclear deal. That is to say, in any approach involving foreign aid and investment, considerable improvement in North Korea’s human rights situation should be placed on the agenda.
In any arrangements involving foreign investment in extraction or production enterprises for export to world markets, care must be taken to prohibit the utilization of slave, forced, or prison labor, or the evolution of a situation where free labor from preferred workers is utilized in the export zones while production for domestic distribution and consumption is based on prison and forced labor. Access to foreign markets should be conditioned on respect for all core labor standards, including the prohibition of forced labor, that are established in the International Labor Organization (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
All intergovernmental contact with North Korea should include discussion toward the improvement of human rights conditions, particularly the verified abolition of political prisoner camps and detention centers and the release of those being held. Some repressive practices in North Korea could be ended rather easily. Other aspects may be more complicated. Emptying out the kwan-li-so may require, in part, an orderly departure program and some form of third-country resettlement for those whose treatment or condition is such as to preclude re-integration into North Korean society.
An agreement that provides for economic assistance to North Korea should also mandate the following:
1. North Korea should decriminalize the right to leave and should release all NorthKoreans who have been detained upon repatriation from China.
2. North Korea should release all those prisoners held in arbitrary detention in the kwan-li-so political penal-labor colonies, and invite the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Imprisonment, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and/or Human Rights Watch to observe the closings through on-site visits to the locations of the former kwan-li-so to confirm that these political penallabor colonies are no longer in operation.
3. The brutal mistreatment of convicted prisoners in the kyo-hwa-so prison-labor facilities must end. The World Food Program (WFP) and humanitarian relief organizations should be invited to supply food aid to the prisons in order to alleviate the problem of virtually constant semi-starvation among prisoners and high levels of deaths in detention from combinations of forced labor and below-subsistence-level food rations.
4. North Korea should initiate a dialogue with the International Labor Organizationto bring the “reform-through-labor” in the kyo-hwa-so prison-labor facilities, jip-kyul-so detention centers, and ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae labor-training camps into conformity with international standards against forced and slave labor.
5. North Korea should invite representatives from the Office of the U.N. HighCommissioner for Human Rights, the Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in order to implement the recommendations to the DPRK from the U.N. Human Rights Committee and U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
47 Office of the UNHCR, Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status, para. 94 and 95. (Geneva: United Nations, 1988).
48 A recently formed group of former North Korean political prisoners has expressed the fear that increasing exposure of the officially denied kwan-li-so, along with increased pressure over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, might lead the regime to “massacre the prisoners” in order to destroy evidence of the camps. These former prisoners have called for increased satellite reconnaissance of these camps. This report supports their appeal for increased and ongoing satellite monitoring of the camps along with the recommendation that any suspect activity be immediately reported to the U.N. Secretary-General, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Presidents of the Security Council and General Assembly. The coordinates for camps pictured in this report are featured in the small maps in the margins of this report.
49 The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) usually takes a dim view of U.N. agencies taking over what are clearly the responsibilities of Member States, such as feeding prisoners in state penal institutions. Nonetheless, to avert starvation and malnutrition-related disease, WFP provides foods to prisons in other countries and could do so in North Korea as well.
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