Seoul to petition UN for detainees in NK

By Kim Young-jin

Seoul has picked up its efforts to rescue a 69-year-old woman stranded in North Korea along with her two daughters including petitioning the United Nations to take up the issue.

Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan told lawmakers that Seoul is pushing to petition the U.N. to help repatriate Shin Sook-ja and her children who have been detained since 1985 after traveling there with her husband.

He said the petition would be made after collecting signatures from 100,000 people. Such efforts could prove timely as they could coincide with a visit to Seoul by the U.N.'s special rapporteur on North Korean human rights, who is expected to meet Shin's husband in Seoul next month.

Seoul is also mulling establishing a task force to search for ways to handle Shin’s case and those of thousands of other South Koreans abducted by Pyongyang.

Interest in her plight has spiked in recent months on the back of a grassroots campaign that began in her hometown. The movement has sparked fresh interest in the issue of South Koreans detained by the North.

Seoul believes some 517 civilians are still alive there after being kidnapped since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Won Jae-chun, a professor of law at Handong International Law School, applauded the effort to bring the problem to the U.N., saying there remained untapped international mechanisms to deal with it.

“This is tremendous,” Won said. “The government should be using all existing human rights mechanisms to address this and it hasn’t been doing that.”

He pointed to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that the North is a signatory as a mechanism that could prompt UN intervention.

Activists have criticized the South, especially administrations that advocated engagement with Pyongyang for allowing the issue to fall by the wayside in the name of improving ties.

North Korea has long denied its human rights abuses, from abduction to its sprawling political prisoner system.

The North is believed to have abducted 3,835 South Korean citizens, mostly fishermen, since the fratricidal conflict ended in an armistice.

Activists say the abductions are clear violations of the Geneva Convention.