The UN yesterday reported on a deeply institutionalized system of forced labor in North Korea, which in some cases could amount to the crime against humanity of enslavement.
In a damning report, the UN Human Rights Office detailed how people in the reclusive and authoritarian country are “controlled and exploited through an widespread, multi-layered system of forced labour.”
“The testimonies in this report give a shocking and distressing insight into the suffering inflicted through forced labour upon people,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a statement.
Photo: Korean Central News Agency via Reuters
“These people are forced to work in intolerable conditions — often in dangerous sectors with the absence of pay, free choice, ability to leave, protection, medical care, time off, food and shelter,” he said.
Many face regular beatings and women are “exposed to continuing risks of sexual violence,” he said.
The rights office relied on a range of sources for the report, including 183 interviews conducted from 2015 to last year with victims, and witnesses who escaped North Korea and were living abroad.
“If we didn’t meet the daily quota, we were beaten and our food was cut,” said one victim cited in the report.
The latest allegations follow a landmark report published by a UN team of investigators a decade ago that documented forced labor among other rampant rights abuses such as deliberate starvation, rape and torture in North Korea.
Yesterday’s report zeroed in on an institutionalized system, with six different types of forced labor, including during the country’s 10-year minimum military conscription. There were also compulsory state-assigned jobs and the use of revolutionary “Shock Brigades,” or state-organized groups of citizens forced to carry out “arduous manual labor,” often in construction and agriculture, the report said.
Such projects can last for months and even years, during which time workers must live on site and receive little or no remuneration, it found.
There were also other forms of work mobilizations, including of school children, and work performed by people sent abroad to earn foreign currency for the state, the report said.
For instance, North Koreans were reportedly sent to help build facilities ahead of the FIFA World Cup events in Russia and Qatar.
Those sent abroad lose up to 90 percent of their wages to the state, work under constant surveillance and have their passports confiscated, with almost no time off, the report said.
In some instances the level of control and exploitation “may reach the threshold of ‘ownership,’” the report said.
This, it said, might “constitute the crime against humanity of enslavement.”
The most serious concerns surrounded places of detention, where forced labor victims systematically had to work under threat of physical violence and in inhumane conditions, it said.
The report called on the UN Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.
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