Seoul to allow NKn defectors to assess treatment at overseas missions

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Foreign Affairs

Seoul to allow NKn defectors to assess treatment at overseas missions

Posted : 2012-09-17 11:48

Updated :

South Korea plans to ask North Korean defectors to comment on their treatment at overseas missions on their way to the South, an official said Monday, in a move to improve official dealings with them.

The plan comes about three months after Seoul's foreign ministry launched a probe into its embassy staff in Thailand, following a media report that criticized some of the staff for verbally abusing North Korean defectors there.

The probe found that some South Korean embassy staff had taken a "high-handed" approach during their treatment of North Korean defectors at a refugee camp there, but they strongly denied an allegation of using expletives toward the defectors, Seoul officials said.

"The government is pushing forward with a plan to allow North Korean defectors, who arrive in the South through overseas missions, to assess how they were treated there," the foreign ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Such assessments would be made after the defectors enter the Hanawon center, which serves as a temporary base while they adjust to life in the South, the official said.

Annual arrivals of North Korean defectors to the South have numbered more than 3,000 in recent years.

More than 24,000 North Koreans have defected to the South in recent decades after traveling through China, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. The Koreas are divided by a heavily fortified border as a result of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. (Yonhap)

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