By Park Si-soo
About 60 North Koreans were executed publicly last year for acts against its regime, up from seven a year before, Amnesty International said Thursday.
The increase indicates the poverty-stricken country is desperate to quash a growing number of dissidents, the human rights group said.
In its annual report, it said millions of North Koreans are suffering from acute malnutrition as a consequence of a combination of poor economic policies, adverse weather and reduced international aid.
It said some 40,000 children under the age of five suffer acute malnutrition each year, citing statistics from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
“North Korea continues to carry out executions, some in public and others in secret. At least 60 people are believed to have been executed publicly,” Amnesty said.
It said an armaments factory worker was executed in late January in Hamheung for divulging ― via an illegal Chinese mobile phone ― rice prices and other information on living conditions to a friend who had defected to South Korea.
Last July, Amnesty called on the North Korean government to seek international humanitarian assistance to counter the food shortage, while urging the South to provide assistance without political considerations.
Yet, the South Korean government has refused to do so as the North declined to accept the South’s call to apologize for sinking the warship Cheonan and shelling Yeonpyeong Island last year. Seoul believes Pyongyang is to blame for the two deadly incidents.
Meanwhile, Amnesty criticized the South Korean government for punishing its critics with what it called a “vaguely worded” national security laws and maintaining the death penalty.
The disputed law’s nature is anti-communism. But it has often been abused by conservative leaders to suppress liberal-minded political rivals.
The death penalty exists here, but no execution has been carried out since 1997. In 2007, Amnesty categorized South Korea as having “virtually abolished capital punishment.”
At present, 63 people are on death row with three of them in the process of appealing, it said.
Separately, the head of South Korea's human rights watchdog sent a letter Thursday to about 15,000 North Korean defectors, urging them to report any human rights abuses they had suffered or witnessed while in the communist state.
In the letter, Hyun Byung-chul of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) also expressed his personal regret for the lack of a proper system in South Korea to keep track of such abuses in North Korea, the NHRCK official said.
"What you report will be kept completely confidential along with your identity," Hyun said in the letter.