North Korea: Sexual Offences

(asked on 22nd February 2016) - View Source

Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, with reference to the Answer of 5 January 2015 to Question 219046, what response his Department has received from Democratic People's Republic of Korea authorities; and whether progress has been made on improving North Korean women's rights in China.


Answered by
Lord Swire Portrait
Lord Swire
This question was answered on 25th February 2016

We continue to urge the DPRK authorities, through both our Embassy in Pyongyang and the DPRK Embassy in London, to respond in detail to the contents of the Commission of Inquiry report, including the violence and exploitation of women that it documents. The DPRK continues to reject the Commission’s findings and will not engage on the detail of the Commission’s report.

Women trafficked out of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are among the most vulnerable of those who flee the country. We call on the DPRK to improve its appalling human rights record and create better conditions for its women. We regularly discuss our concerns about the DPRK with China, as I did with the Vice-Minister of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Fengxiang, in December 2015. We will seek to include this issue in the next UK-China Human Rights Dialogue due to be held in April. We also work directly with the Chinese authorities on a number of projects to counter human trafficking, which seek to protect the most vulnerable from exploitation, abuse, neglect and violence.

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