By Irving Feng
Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia

PYONGYANG, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – The United Nations (UN) met on Monday to vote on and, hopefully, establish an independent commission to probe the allegedly worsening human rights abuses rampant in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or more commonly known as North Korea).

The UN’s desire to investigate the human rights situation in North Korea is based on a report compiled by Marzuki Darusman.  Mr. Darusman is an Indonesian lawyer by trade and has been appointed to the UN as a Special Rapporteur on human rights for North Korea.

Darusman, in his report, describes the human rights violations currently being perpetrated in the totalitarian state as “grave, systematic and widespread.”  The report highlights abuses such as rapes, tortures, executions, arbitrary arrests, government sanctioned abductions, and, perhaps what is most troubling, a seemingly large scale expansion of the gulag, or prison camp system.

According to official UN reports, analysts, who have been monitoring North Korea from 2006 to 2013, have found an expansion of a previously constructed 20 km perimeter located in the Ch’oma-Bong valley.  The site is known as Camp No. 14, and reports estimate roughly 200,000 prisoners are held within the borders of the camp.

The living conditions within the camp are described as “dire,” and “extremely harrowing.”  Darusman believes that the camps are designed in a way so that the detainees of the camps endure a slow and painful death.

Robert King, U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, provided additional evidence to support the worsening scenario in North Korea as the newly ascended, young leader, Kim Jong-un, tightens his grip on his squalid subjects.  King’s report suggested that 2,600 North Koreans were able to escape to South Korea in 2011.

This figure of escaped North Koreans has fallen by 43 percent in initial data reports for 2013.  Darusman also supported this scenario of Jong-un tightening his grip by noting that the number of North Koreans escaping to China has dwindled since the death of Kim Jong-il, Jong-un’s father.

The North Korean representative in the UN has slammed the investigation as a hoax and a witch hunt.  So Se Pyong, North Korea’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, denounced Darusman’s report, calling all of the evidence collected a fraud.

So Se Pyong believes that the investigation is the UN’s plot to put North Korea under greater international scrutiny and tarnish the sterling image of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  Navi Pilay, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, called for a grave need to investigate North Korea’s human rights abuses rather than the media focus on the North’s nuclear arms programs.

For further information, please see:

Bloomberg – North Korean Rights Abuses May Be Crimes Against Humanity – 12 March 2013

International Herald Tribune – A Push to Investigate North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses – 11 March 2013

Reuters – North Korea slams U.N. “plot” to investigate its human rights record – 11 March 2013

The Asahi Shimbun – U.N. urged to probe North Korean leaders’ role in abuses – 5 February 2013