By Ariel Lin
Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia

PYONGYANG, North Korea – North Korea is a source for men, women, and children trafficking.  The men, women, and children are used for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. North Korea was rated as a Tier 3 country in US State Department’s annual Trafficking in Person Report in 2005. Since then, the government has failed to comply with minimal international standards to prevent the human trafficking from its borders.

Between 80 percent and 90 percent of the refugees from North Korean, especially women and young children, end up as trafficking victims in China. Reports estimate tens of thousands of North Koreans are believed to be hiding in China. Women and children are particularly vulnerable to traffickers in China because the Chinese government’s policy of detaining the refugees and sending them back to North Korea.

In the most common form of trafficking, North Korean women and children who voluntarily cross the border into China are picked up by trafficking rings and sold as brides to Chinese or placed in forced labor. However, sometimes North Korean women and girls are lured out of North Korean by the promise of food, jobs and freedom, only to be forced into prostitution, marriage, or exploitative labor arrangements once in China.

A young woman was sold to a 34-year-old Chinese man for marriage and deported to North Korea. There, she was thrown into a North Korean State Safety and Security Agency Camp, where she was forced to undress and physically abused. According to her statement, pregnant inmates were forced to miscarry on the grounds they were bearing Chinese children. She also expressed that she is willing to go back to the Chinese man who bought her first because she had a better life with him, as well for the benefits to her blind mother and young brother.

A senior U.S. official urged China to change its law to protect victims of trafficking instead of returning them home, and also to allow the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to operate along the border region with North Korea.

For more information, please see:

The Chosun Ilbo – Human Trafficking Thrives Across N.Korea-China Border – 2 March 2008

U.S. Department of State – North Korean Refugees Frequent Victims of Human Trafficking – 20 July 2005

U.S.State Department Trafficking in Persons Report – Human Trafficking & Modern-Day Slavery – June 2007

YonHap News – US Blames China on NK Human Trafficking – 3 March 2008