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, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a report.
Guards make detainees undress and repeatedly subject them to body searches for money and concealed items, the report to the UN General Assembly, obtained on Friday by The Associated Press, said.
The prisoners are interrogated, sometimes for up to a month or longer, and their cells are so overcrowded that they cannot lie down, it added.
Photo: AP
The UN Human Rights Council received and analyzed accounts of North Koreans who had experienced detention, the vast majority of them women who escaped initially to China, Guterres said, adding that from September last year to May, the office interviewed more than 330 people who left the country.
The former detainees alleged “gross violations of the rights to life, liberty and security of the person” perpetrated by staff, he said.
North Korea has repeatedly said that it does not violate human rights.
North Korean Ambassador to the UN Han Tae-song in May said that the government made a “devoted effort for the good of the people” and “human rights violations, in whatever form, are intolerable.”
However, North Korea has refused to give visas to UN human rights officials, except once in 2017 to an investigator who was looking into conditions for the disabled.
Guterres said that “former detainees report extremely unsanitary conditions and insufficient food causing malnourishment, illness and occasionally also death of other detainees.”
Reports received by the human rights office “include cases of sexual violence by prison officials against female detainees, including during invasive body searches,” Guterres said, adding that some guards make detainees sit or kneel all day, “allowing them to stretch their limbs for two minutes every hour, or less.”
“Moving without permission can result in personal or collective physical punishment,” he said.
During pre-trial periods, detainees are provided no access to lawyers and “accounts reveal that detainees are simply informed of their prison sentences at the end of the investigation, particularly in cases where the accused is sentenced to up to six months in a short-term labor camp,” he said.
Prisoners are forced to work long hours and there are “multiple reports of prisoners dying as a result of accidents,” he added.
Guterres said that accounts documented by the human rights office reveal the “prevalence of corruption” in North Korea’s penal system.
“Bribes can be paid to avoid arrest and detention, to mitigate or avoid prison sentences, to avoid beatings, to ameliorate the harshness of the forced labor required and to secure family visits,” he said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS