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We Can’t Ignore North Korea’s Human Rights Record

For 65 years the North Korean people have suffered under perhaps the most regimented and repressive political system of the last century. The Kim dynasty, which has ruled North Korea since the end of World War II, has perfected a system of control even the great totalitarian states of the 20th century—Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—would envy.  What is more, the Kims created it and ran it without much notice by the outside world. Human rights organizations and the western media were for many years reluctant to expose the crimes of the North Korean state against its own people. Much of this reluctance was a function of how closed and isolated the North is from the outside world and the difficulty of getting any authoritative information on conditions inside the country, while others believed North Korea had created an egalitarian society which cared for its people, even if at a cost of individual freedom.

The scarcity of information on human rights in North Korea began to change over the past decade as more than 20,000 defectors made their way to South Korea and because a bipartisan group formed of diplomats, Korea experts, and human rights specialists founded the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea to conduct meticulous research and produce dispassionate reports on the North Korean system (full disclosure: I serve as co-chair of the committee). Earlier in 2012 the committee released its 13th report—this one on the prison system of North Korea which houses between 150,000-200,000 people who belong to the disloyal class suspected of political crimes. Three generations of each suspected family may live out their lives in these camps because one of their ancestors fought for South Korea during the Korean War 60 years ago, had an ancestor who was a businessman or large landowner before the Communist state was created in the 1940s, or who committed a political crime such as not treating a photograph of a member of the Kim dynasty with sufficient awe. As many as 100,000 people have died in the camps from summary executions because of an infraction of camp rules, from starvation deaths because food rations are below survival levels, or from the frequent beatings or torture.