Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con) [V]]

While comparisons with the holocaust should never be made lightly, the suffering of at least 200,000 North Koreans in Kim Jong-un’s prison camps, many of them prisoners of conscience, is not dissimilar from that in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or Stalin’s gulag. The only difference with North Korea is that the incarceration, atrocities and absolute totalitarian repression have continued there for longer—for decades.

More than 10 years ago, the UN’s first special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea described the human rights crisis there as sui generis—in a category of its own. A 2014 UN commission of inquiry chaired by the distinguished Australian judge Michael Kirby concluded that the gravity, scale and nature of human rights violations in North Korea reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world, and designated those violations as crimes against humanity. The reality is that, in North Korea, there is no freedom whatsoever. Every single article of the universal declaration of human rights is violated every single day.

That 2014 UN report recommended that those responsible be brought to account, but those steps have not been taken, and subsequent years have seen only further crimes. In the light of that, the all-party parliamentary group on North Korea, of which I am a co-chair, launched an inquiry into human rights in that country since the UN report of 2014. Our aim is to shine a parliamentary light. We also wish to spotlight the urgent need for the UK and other states to challenge and suppress these ongoing violations in North Korea, and to work towards bringing those responsible to justice. It is welcome that Lord Ahmad, our Minister for human rights, attended the APPG recently and make clear his support for, and the active engagement of the FCDO with, our inquiry.

The voice that matters in this debate is that of the victims and survivors, to whom I pay tribute. One such is the North Korean escapee Timothy Cho, who not long ago worked as an intern in my office for a year. His hope and enthusiasm for democracy, freedom and the rule of law to be present in his home country is inspirational. We owe it to him and to the victims and remaining survivors of the holocaust and other genocides, however difficult the challenge, not to ignore human rights violations across the globe, including those in North Korea today.