ICC NOTE: North Korea has held the top spot for the worst place to live as a Christian for 14 straight years. Reports of systematic torture, execution, and other inhumane tactics are common among North Korean defectors fleeing the repressive nation. While the United Nations and other foreign bodies continue to place new sanctions and pressure the Kim Jong Un regime to reform, little has been accomplished. With the threat of nuclear war according to intelligence sources, the news, and North Korea itself, the international communities efforts to enact change on the peninsula is limited at best. The best weapon against North Korean atrocities at this moment is to continue to pray for God’s rescue of his children from the evil that is the North Korean regime.
4/21/2016 North Korea (VOA)– Widespread and systematic human rights abuses in North Korea continue despite two years of intense efforts by the United Nations to pressure the Kim Jong Un government to change, says a new report by a Korean human rights organization.
The report released this week by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) was based on interviews with thousands of North Korean defectors who now live in South Korea.
The finding of over 50,000 cases of human rights violations in North Korea is not verifiable and could be overstated, as it includes not only what witnesses have directly experienced and observed, but also what they have heard from others.
Still it provides rare insight and documents extensive testimony to support its conclusion that conditions in the secretive and repressive North Korean state have not improved since 2014, when the United Nations released an investigative report documenting a network of political prisons camps in the country and widespread atrocities comparable to what the Nazis did before and during World War II.
“The [U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] report actually had a very restricted influence overall and we do not see any significant improvement,” said Yoon Yeo-sang, the Chief Director of NKDB’s North Korean Human Rights Archives.
UN pressure
The international community has tried to pressure the Kim Jong Un leadership to make reforms and hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable, or face escalating penalties and eventual prosecution.
Based on the Commission of Inquiry report, the U.N. General Assembly voted to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. However the measure has still not been brought to a vote in the Security Council, given the near certainty that North Korea allies Russia and China would veto it.
