Behind bars in North Korea: public executions and sexual violence are part of grim reality, UN says

UN Secretary-General António Guterres says in a new report on North Korea’s grim human rights record that prisoners who tried to escape or steal have reportedly been publicly executed, and detainees have been subject to sexual violence and severely beaten with clubs and metal rods.

The report to the General Assembly said guards make detainees undress and repeatedly subject them to body searches for money and concealed items. They are interrogated, sometimes for up to a month or longer, and their cells are so overcrowded they can’t lie down, it said.

The secretary general said the UN human rights office received and analysed accounts of North Koreans who had experienced detention, the vast majority of them women who escaped initially to China. Between September and May, he said, the office interviewed more than 330 individuals who left the country.

The former detainees alleged “gross violations of the rights to life, liberty and security of the person” perpetrated by security officers, Guterres said.

North Korea has repeatedly said it does not violate human rights. In May, the country’s ambassador in Geneva, Han Tae-song, said the government made a “devoted effort for the good of the people” and “human rights violations, in whatever form, are intolerable”.