Improved access to education, health care and food in North Korea but right to freedom of movement and the right to life worsen, says new report
Life improving in some areas for North Koreans, but fewer defectors and higher secrecy mean it’s more difficult for activists to gather their data
Public executions have declined and access to education, health care and food has improved in North Korea, but secret executions and illegal detentions have increased since leader Kim Jong-un took power in 2011.
While the regime is sensitive to international criticism of its human rights abuses, increased secrecy and a reduced flow of defectors recently have made information gathering more difficult.
These were some findings of the Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights, an independent, Seoul-based body which supplied much of the data for the 2014 United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry Report on North Korean human rights. The centre is also tasked by the South Korean government with interviewing incoming defectors about human rights violations.
The centre has 52,735 human rights violations on record, largely gathered from defector testimony and dating back to the 1940s. Centre staff briefed Seoul reporters on their latest findings yesterday.
Looking at nine categories of human rights violations, chief director Yoon Yoo-sang said between 2011-2014, increased violations were seen in three categories – arbitrary arrests and detention, the right to freedom of movement and the right to life.
“North Korea received a lot of criticism and pressure on public executions and turned to secret executions with almost no witnesses,” he said. Many secretly executed persons are members of the regime elite.
With improvements in living conditions, loyalty is decreasing due to the much wider inflow of information
“Since the ascent to power of Kim Jong-un, there have been a number of internal political problems and a lot of human rights violations are being caused by internal political matters,” he said. “Lots of cases of human rights violations – enforced disappearances and executions – are connected with this consolidation of power.”
Forty secret executions were recorded between 2011 and 2014 – 6.7 per cent of 591 cases dating back to before 1950. However, Yoon said a reduced flow of defectors and a lack of data in the last five years were behind that low percentage. Some 102 cases of public executions were recorded between 2011 and 2014; 3.2 per cent of the total of 3,233 on record.
Following purges, the numbers exiled from the capital, home to North Korea’s elite, have risen.
“Many family members of the purged have been forcefully deported from Pyongyang to other provinces,” Yoon said. He dubbed these people – guilty only by association – “no crime” victims.
Still, some things have improved under the third-generation Kim. In the “social rights” category, Yoon said access to education and health care have increased and the nation’s food situation has greatly improved since the famines of the 1990s.
Such improvements relate to the freer and increasingly market-based economy that now prevails, nurtured by cross-border trade with China. Yet this has not necessarily boosted loyalty to Kim’s government, Yoon suggested.
“With improvements in living conditions, loyalty is decreasing due to the much wider inflow of information,” Yoon said.
“Usually North Korea does not respond externally to human rights reports, but internally, authorities examine them in detail and compare them to the real situation.” Some internees in the notorious Yodok Camp, he said, were moved to a more lenient prison near Pyongyang after foreign criticism.
He urged the international community to ramp up oversight and criticism of the country’s human rights violations.
