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North Korea must legalise markets to prevent rights abuses: UN
SEOUL, May 28, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – North Korea must create a legal framework
for traders buying and selling basic necessities such as food and clothing to
tackle rights violations in the country, the UN’s human rights body said
Tuesday.
Campaign groups estimate around three-quarters of North Korea’s population
depends on private market activity to survive since the collapse of the
public distribution system — a state rations network — in the mid-1990s.
But despite being widespread, market activity remains a “legal grey area”
in the North and a “source of further human rights violations”, said the UN’s
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
“In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, people face both a failed
public distribution system and an insecure informal sector where they are
exposed to prosecution and corruption,” it said in a report, using the
country’s official name.
The OHCHR document — based on interviews with 214 North Koreans — said
Pyongyang had failed to legalise people’s efforts to find food and clothing
outside the public distribution system, even though it was their only way to
secure daily necessities.
“There is only one reason North Koreans engage in market activity and that
is to feed themselves,” said Ju Chan-yang, a North Korean defector who sold
foreign goods in black markets before fleeing in 2010.
In Geneva, the North’s diplomatic mission to the UN described the report
as “pie in the sky”.
“Such reports are nothing more than fabrication… as they are always
based on the so-called testimonies of ‘defectors’ who provide fabricated info
to earn their living or are compelled under duress or enticement,” it said.
UN human rights officer Daniel Collinge said the lack of legal clarity for
commercial activity meant North Koreans who engaged in market activity faced
the risk of arrest and detention by authorities.
“The behaviour that such market activity involves, including making
international telephone calls and travelling within and across state borders
is also criminalised and therefore subject to extortion,” he said.
“This threat of arbitrary arrest and the harsh consequences that follow
provide state officials with the powerful means to secure bribes from a
vulnerable population,” he added.
Corruption was “endemic” in the North, he said, so that only those willing
and able to pay bribes could strive towards an adequate standard of living.
– ‘Evil person’ –
Pyongyang should “undertake profound legal and institutional reforms”, the
report said.
The North says it protects human rights and is improving people’s
standards of living.
The isolated country, which is under several sets of sanctions over its
nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programmes, has long struggled to feed
itself and last year recorded its worst harvest in more than a decade.
Pyongyang has been frequently condemned by the international community for
decades of prioritising the military and its nuclear weapons programme over
adequately providing for its people — an imbalance some critics say the UN’s
aid programme encourages.
Over the past year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has engaged in a flurry
of diplomacy, including three summits with the South’s Moon Jae-in and two
meetings with US President Donald Trump.
But the issue of human rights abuses in the North has largely been off the
table at the summits, with Trump instead boasting of his special bond with
Kim. “We ought not to call people who run terrible human rights regimes our
best friends and wonderful people,” former state department official Morton
Halperin said Tuesday.
“What we should be saying is he’s somebody we think we can do business
with to reduce the risk of a nuclear war,” he told reporters in Seoul, “but
do it in a way that makes clear that we understand what an evil person he
is”.
Ahead of his Hanoi summit with the North Korean leader in February, Trump
repeatedly dangled the prospect of the North becoming an economic powerhouse
if it gave up its arsenal, but the two failed to reach a deal.
BSS/AFP/RY/1750 hrs