Criticism on human rights overshadows congress

By Yi Whan-woo

The United Nations and other international organizations dealing with North Korea’s dire human rights situation have renewed calls this week for its leader Kim Jong-un to be put on trial for state-perpetrated crimes.

These calls are coinciding with the Seventh Workers’ Party Congress in the North, which opened Friday, for the first time since 1980.

In preparation for the meeting, the regime is believed to have forcibly mobilized its people for mass celebrations and construction projects. It also reportedly extorted money from “slave workers” abroad.

Marzuki Darusman, the U.N. special rapporteur on North Korea, reiterated his demands to prosecute Kim and other members of the North Korean leadership before the International Criminal Court (ICC) during a forum at the U.N. headquarters in New York, Thursday.

Darusman was one of the 150 participants at the “International Symposium on Human Rights Violations, including Abductions by North Korea.” The Japanese government organized the meeting. Other participants included North Korean defectors, non-governmental organization (NGO) workers and scholars.

Darusman said Kim holds the “ultimate responsibility” for ignoring the U.N.’s demands to improve North Korea’s human rights in line with the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) report, according to the Korean-language website of Radio Free Asia.

He also asked the international community to step up its cooperation for the punishment of the North Korean leadership.

Published in February 2014, the COI report accused the reclusive state of running political prison camps where up to 120,000 people are thought to be detained.

It also called for a referral of Kim to the ICC for committing crimes against humanity.

During a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in March, Darusman said the time has come for the world to “move on with the next logical step.”

“We are closing in on the North Koreans, and the nature of the regime is such that with total, complete control of the system nothing happens anywhere in that country without the say-so of the highest, supreme leader, the chairman of that country,” he said at the time.

Robert King, the U.S. Department of State’s special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, voiced a similar view at the forum, Thursday.

He said the U.S. has no tolerance for human rights issues and that North Korea should address human rights issues itself.

In a separate forum in Seoul, Tuesday, Signe Poulsen, representative of the Seoul office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the international community cannot overlook human rights abuses in the secretive state.

Poulsen stressed that those responsible for North Korea’s rights abuses should be held accountable retroactively.

The office opened in June 2015 to exclusively monitor Pyongyang’s state-perpetrated human rights violations as a follow-up to the COI report.

The New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) also urged Kim in a letter, Tuesday, to stop mobilizing his people in preparation for this year’s Workers’ Party Congress. The letter issued by HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth accused Kim of remaining unchanged in his efforts to improve quality of his people’s livelihoods and asked him to stop such practices. It also asked North Korea to join the U.N.’s International Labor Organization.

The National Intelligence Service said North Koreans in general are against the regime for bolstering its surveillance and forcing them to join state-run festivals to commemorate the congress instead of going to work.

The regime has demanded $2 a week from low-income households, while ordering those who have more than $3,000 to exchange it for the North Korean currency.