Korean Peninsula

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, I serve as an officer on the North Korea All-Party Parliamentary Group which the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, chairs so ably. It will, alas, become clear that this membership has not given me any fluency in the Korean language. I intend to focus my remarks on the rule of law—or the lack of it—in North Korea, but I also want to mention the question of religious freedom.

My noble friend will know that 179 former North Korean political prisoners and defectors recently wrote to the foreign ministers of a number of UN countries appealing for their Governments to support an international inquiry into crimes against humanity in the DPRK. A remarkable coalition of almost 50 human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Human Rights Watch and the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, endorsed this request. I join the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in asking my noble friend to outline consideration given to that proposal for an international inquiry.

Will she also outline how Her Majesty’s Government have responded to calls from the United Nations for individual states such as the United Kingdom to shine a light on what we all agree are systematic and heinous violations of human rights, which may possibly be the worst in the world? This request chimes with the welcome remarks of my right honourable friend William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, in calling for human rights to be a central strand of this country’s foreign policy.

In October, Dr Marzuki Darusman, the current UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—an ironic title—presented his latest report to the General Assembly of the UN. He stated that,

“for several decades egregious human rights abuses in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been extensively documented by various actors, including organizations of the United Nations system”.

He called for a much more rigorous approach by the international community in collating, assessing and acting upon the evidence of widespread abuses of human rights.

As the coalition of human rights organisations has said, the time is long past for an urgent, thorough, independent and impartial international investigation of the system of political prisoner camps known as kwan-li-so, in which gross violations of human rights, including torture, forced labour, sexual violence and executions, are widespread and systematic. All of these have been extensively documented and highlighted during evidence-taking sessions by the All-Party Group on North Korea. Although it is 60 years since the armistice was agreed, the human consequences of the Korean War still, unfortunately, reverberate. Just before Christmas, two of the families of Korean War abductees visited Westminster. Even after the passage of so much time, these families have still not come to terms with the abduction of their loved ones.

A separate group also gave evidence to members of the all-party group about an abduction which occurred in 1969. Lee Mi-il’s father, Lee Seong-hwan, was one of an estimated 100,000 people who were abducted by the North Koreans during the course of hostilities and never allowed to return to their families. Mr Lee and his family had been trapped in their apartment after the North Koreans captured Seoul and blew up the Han River bridge. On 4 September 1950 a North Korean major came for Mr Lee, accused him of giving money to those fighting the communists, and took him away. His wife, who was heavily pregnant with their second child and is now in her 90s, has never seen him again or heard any news about his fate. She has spent a lifetime waiting for him to return. Her daughter says:

“My mother says she has given up hope of seeing him before she dies, but I know she still has hope in her heart”.

Mrs Lee’s story is one of several testimonies contained in a short book with the well chosen title, Ongoing Tragedy.

In the report that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, published two years ago, Building Bridges Not Walls, they set out the case for a systematic approach based on upholding human rights and the rule of law. They have helped to encourage a growing international consensus around this objective, and it was encouraging to see, for the first time, the adoption of the annual resolution on North Korea at the UN Human Rights Council in March 2012. More recently, in November 2012, the UN General Assembly’s Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee also adopted the annual North Korea resolution by consensus for the first time ever. This shows increasing international resolve and momentum, but still more needs to be done, not least because, despite those resolutions, North Korea has failed to change its repressive policies.

Let me also say that part of the remit should be an examination of religious persecution in North Korea. Here I remind the House of my interest as chairman of the All-Party Group on International Religious Freedom. As the right reverend Prelate outlined, North Korea is bottom of the table for religious repression and has been for 11 consecutive years. A senior defector remarked:

“The North Korean authorities put defectors in different categories according to the reason they left. Those who bring a Bible back or have been involved with Christians in China tend to be executed”.

Religious Intelligence UK estimates that there are 406,000 Christians in North Korea, and a possible further 280,000 secret Christians. None of these statistics is verifiable, but what is verifiable is the fate of those who practise their faith.

In 2011, reports detailed a further campaign of execution against Christians in North Korea. At least 20 Christians were arrested and sent to the Yodok political prison camp for their faith. When the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and noble Baroness, Lady Cox, raised these reports, North Korean officials said that they were “lies” and that the execution of Christians was “impossible”. Compare that response with the evidence given here in Parliament by a Christian woman who escaped from one of the camps. Jeon Young-Ok had to undertake risky expeditions across the North Korean border to find money and food for her children, who were suffering in the deadly famine of the 1990s. She was caught and jailed twice in her efforts to feed her family. Mrs Jeon was caught and put in the northern Pyeong-an detention camp. She recalled:

“We were made to pull the beards from the faces of elderly people. Prison guards treated them like animals. The women were forced to strip. A group of us were thrown just one blanket and we were forced to pull it from one another as we tried to hide our shame. I felt like an animal, no better than a pig. I didn't want to live”.

Jeon Young-Ok added:

“They tortured the Christians the most. They were denied food and sleep. They were forced to stick out their tongues and iron was pushed into it”.

Despite all this, she harbours no hatred for her country and shows extraordinary composure when she states:

“The past is not important but these terrible things are still happening in North Korea”.

That is why we must act.

The international community, which for so long has appeared indifferent to the fate of women such as Jeon Young-Ok should remind itself of Dietrich Bonheoffer’s warning:

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil”.

Bonhoeffer perished at the hands of the Nazi regime that was responsible for racial cleansing, slave labour, brutal torture, the disregard of lawful process and manifold abuses of human rights. Too many people turned a blind eye to all that. Our generation should not be guilty of making the same mistake.