By Kevin M. Mathewson
Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia

GENEVA – United Nations investigators say North Korea has committed crimes against humanity in an effort to sustain its political system and will call for an international criminal investigation.

A report to be released Monday draws on testimony of survivors and those who escaped the country. It is the most authoritative account yet of rights violations by North Korean authorities. The report details how North Koreans have been summarily executed, subjected to rape, forced abortions and enslavement, and have suffered persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds. There is even evidence of a widespread campaign of abductions of individuals in South Korea and Japan.

While the report does not examine individual responsibility for the crimes, it recommends steps towards accountability.

Michael Kirby, a retired Australian judge and chairman of the independent Commission of Inquiry, said the report “calls for attention from the international community”.

“At the end of the Second World War so many people said ‘if only we had known… if only we had known the wrongs that were done in the countries of the hostile forces'”, he said.

“Well, now the international community does know… There will be no excusing the failure of action because we didn’t know,” he said at a news conference at UN headquarters in Geneva.

The three-member commission, led by Kirby, was set up by the U.N.’s top human rights body last March in an attempt to probe evidence of systematic rights violations in the authoritarian state notorious for its political prisons camps, and repression and famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1990s.

The commission, which was never allowed into North Korea to conduct public hearings, recommends that the U.N. Security Council refer its findings to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Yet, there are several procedural hurdles. For example, permanent council members that have veto power, such as Chine, are unlikely to support any referral to the court. Another obstacle is that the court’s jurisdiction does not extend to crimes committed before July 2002.

When the Human Rights Council authorized the commission last March, the North denounced it as politically motivated by “hostile forces” trying to discredit it and change its socialist system.

A spokesman for North Korea’s U.N. Mission in New York who refused to give his name told the AP, “We totally reject the unfounded findings of the Commission of Inquiry regarding crimes against humanity. We will never accept that.”

For more information, please see:

BBC News – World must act on North Korea rights abuse, says UN report – 17 February 2014

CNN – ‘Abundant evidence’ of crimes against humanity in North Korea, panel says – 17 February 2014

The New York Times – U.N. Panel Finds Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea – 15 February 2014

The Associated Press – Crimes against humanity in NKorea, UN panel finds – 14 February 2014