China’s ‘hidden generation’: plea to give citizenship to stateless children of trafficked North Koreans
Campaigners have urged Beijing to give citizenship to a “hidden generation” of stateless children born to trafficked North Korean women forced into marriage or prostitution in China.
They said an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 children born to North Korean women in China have no nationality and therefore cannot access education, health care and basic rights that most people take for granted.
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If their mothers are deported, they are often abandoned by their Chinese fathers, leaving them effectively orphaned, according to the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea.
Thousands of North Koreans have fled hunger and oppression in the secretive state since a famine in the mid-1990s. Many are in hiding in neighbouring China, which considers them illegal migrants.
The plight of their children is outlined in a report by the rights group co-authored by Yong Joon Park, a teenager now living in Britain who grew up stateless in China.
They treated him badly. His life was worse than the starving children in North Korea
His mother, Jihyun Park, said traffickers sold her as a wife to a poor Chinese farmer after she fled North Korea in 1998.