International activists kicked off a high-profile conference yesterday on human-rights abuses in North Korea by accusing Pyongyang of enslaving its people and calling for the overthrow of Kim Jong Il's regime.
This week's meeting brings together some 700 officials, including Jay Lefkowitz, the US special envoy for North Korean human rights, US Ambassador to South Korea Alexander Vershbow and Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking North Korean to defect to the South.
The conference "will serve as an occasion for raising human rights awareness of the 23 million North Koreans who are suffering the worst human rights violations, and for dealing a fatal blow to Kim Jong Il's dictatorship," Hwang said at the opening of the event in the South Korean capital.
"North Korea is sparing no efforts to abolish people's conscious needs for human rights and to make them spiritual slaves of the supreme leader," he said.
The conference was organized by South Korean human-rights groups and Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization partly funded by the US government, which held a similar meeting in Washington in July. Another session on the North's human rights is scheduled for March in Belgium.
The South Korean government has largely remained silent on the three-day conference, fearing its voice could hurt North-South reconciliation efforts ahead of high-level bilateral talks next week -- and also complicate international efforts to resolve the standoff over the North's nuclear programs.
Seoul's stance has drawn criticism at the conference.
In a separate meeting with South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Chun Young-woo, Lefkowitz called on Seoul to be more actively engaged in improving the North's human rights record, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Lefkowitz said South Korea should link humanitarian aid deliveries to the North to the human rights issue, while Chun stressed the need for balance with the government's policy goal being the establishment of peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, according to the ministry.
South Korean Vice Unification Minister Rhee Bong-jo told reporters that Seoul's policy would "naturally take priority over public demand for improvement of North Korea's human rights record."
"The government will try to help the North Korean government improve its human rights situation by itself," he said, according to the Unification Ministry.
"Our government has serious concerns about North Korea's human rights situation and has a clear position on this," he added.
At the conference, Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, a Washington-based conservative policy group, called Kim "the worst violator of human rights in the world today" -- citing the deaths caused by his policies, involvement in drug trafficking and counterfeiting, kidnappings of South Korean and Japanese citizens and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
She criticized the US government for treading cautiously on the human rights issue while it negotiates with the North to abandon its nuclear weapons.
"Being silent on human rights while negotiating on the nuclear issue means more death for the North Korean people," Scholte said.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
OVERHAUL: The move would likely mark the end to Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operated in nearly 50 languages The parent agency of Voice of America (VOA) on Friday said it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more staff, completing an 85 percent decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda. US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) senior advisor Kari Lake said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of US President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum. “Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image