Earlier this month, the BBC released information gathered from exclusive interviews with three individuals living inside North Korea. Their reports have brought the country back into the headlines, revealing the devastating reality of the situation for North Korean citizens since the COVID-19-triggered border closure in January 2020. They describe widespread starvation and brutal repression, without feasible means of escape.
Hanna Song from the North Korean Database Centre for Human Rights (NKDB) said in an interview with the BBC ‘This [report] takes us back to the most difficult time in North Korean history.’
Song is referring here to the widespread famine of the 1990s known as the arduous march.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was founded in 1948 under the leadership of Kim Il-Sung. The communist nation’s economy was built on a system of state control: a public distribution system for food and material goods, and a state-assigned job system dictating citizen employment.
In the 1990s, however, the flaws of this system became devastatingly apparent, as the North Korean economy collapsed. It was no longer able to provide its citizens with the food, material goods, employment, or wages they needed, resulting in widespread poverty and starvation.
North Korea claims that around 230,000 people died in the four years from 1995-1998. Outside the country, estimates are closer to 2.5-3.5 million. At least 200,000 people were forced to flee across the border to China, many of whom sought refuge and assistance from Protestant churches.
The situation today is being likened by many experts to that period in North Korea’s recent history. But with tighter border controls and even stricter crackdowns on freedom of movement, it is now even harder for individuals to escape.
Chronic food scarcity in North Korea is a longstanding issue, but the 2020 COVID-19 measures – which have restricted imports of basic goods and dramatically hampered the operation of informal markets on which many North Korean families had come to depend on for survival – have exacerbated the problem.
Throughout 2023, news outlets have continued to share glimpses of the deteriorating humanitarian situation in North Korea, including accounts of deaths by starvation in some cities, border guards deserting their posts because of hunger, and starving parents leaving their children at orphanages in the hope that they will be better provided for.
The BBC’s interviewees share similar experiences. One, a resident of the country’s capital Pyongyang, recounts how she regularly goes without meals and has known residents in neighbouring houses to die of starvation.
The pandemic has also had serious implications for human rights in North Korea. It has provided Kim Jong-Un with an excuse to further crack down upon citizens’ freedoms, and to exert the control of his regime to an even greater extent.
North Korea has one of the worst human rights records in the world. Freedoms which are internationally protected as universal and inalienable – including the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom of religion or belief – are almost non-existent within the country’s borders.
Individuals seen as acting contrary to the regime – including and especially those caught worshipping anyone other than the Kim dynasty – risk facing punishments of forced labour, detention in North Korea’s brutal prison camp system, or even execution.
Borders have remained officially closed since January 2020 and increased security – including new fences, watchtowers, guard posts and the issuing of shoot-to-kill orders – has made it even harder to cross illegally. In 2022, only 67 defectors reached South Korea, compared to thousands each year in the 2010s.
In December 2020, the government introduced the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law. This new piece of legislation tightened restrictions on both the entry of external information and the outflow of internal information. All ‘foreign’ materials, including South Korean movies, international radio broadcasts, or religious texts, are banned. Individuals found or suspected of breaking the law can face severe punishment, including imprisonment or execution.
Dire humanitarian circumstances, and systematic and egregious abuses of human rights are not new to North Korea. But the regime’s response to the pandemic has gravely worsened the already desperate situation.
Chronic food shortages and mass starvation are returning to crisis levels, citizens’ rights and freedoms are being repressed to an even greater extent, and it has become even more difficult for North Koreans to flee the country and escape to freedom.
On 21 March 2013, the UN Human Rights Council created the Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Human Rights in the DPRK. The commission was mandated to ‘investigate the systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’.
As part of its detailed research and information gathering process, the COI held extensive public hearings and private interviews in Seoul, Tokyo, London, and Washington DC.
Next year will mark the tenth anniversary of the result of this extensive research, the COI’s landmark report, which is widely considered to be the most comprehensive report into human rights violations in North Korea to date. The report concluded that ‘the gravity, scale and nature of [North Korea’s] violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.’
Today, there is little to suggest that the situation for the people of North Korea has improved. The international community must step up and do more to bring about change.
States must demand that China immediately cease their policy of forcibly repatriating North Korean refugees. Defectors who are forcibly returned to North Korea are charged with ‘treachery against the nation’, sent to prison camps and face abuse, violence and even execution. Individuals repatriated by China who are found to have had contact with churches and missionaries are known to face particularly harsh punishment.
States must remind the international community of the comprehensive recommendations made by the UN COI report – including that the UN Security Council refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court – and must call for renewed efforts towards their implementation.
‘Where so much suffering has occurred, and is still occurring, action is the shared responsibility of the entire international community.’
(Report of the COI on Human Rights in the DPRK, Article 1225 (f))
By CSW’s East Asia Team