U.N. report slams North Korea

Preparing for a periodic review of North Korea for the Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn, a Thai Professor of Law, decried the situation in the quaintly titled Democratic People's Republic of Korea where “public executions, torture and fear were still rife, with many punishments by local administrations without trial.”

He added that in the face of such privations few people were able to escape from Kim Jong-il's self-styled “paradise on earth.”

Political prisons, modeled on the dreaded Soviet gulag system, still form an integral part of the DPRK rule and control; the Special Rapporteur stated that a figure of 154,000 prisoners was an estimate and there is no way to confirm the number. Because human rights officials such as himself are not surprisingly barred from North Korea, it is naturally difficult to gauge specific conditions.

According to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea there are six major gulag-type complexes scattered across the country.

An equally pressing problem for North Korea remains constant food shortages. It is estimated by the U.N. that approximately a third of the population is going hungry and the World Food Program (WFP) could only cover over about 1.4 million people out of the six million who were starving. Prof. Muntarbhorn added that in the case of North Korea, “monitoring of food delivery must be allowed.”

His concerns reflect the reality that in the past such regimes would divert humanitarian supplies to security forces or politically loyal regions at the expense of often targeted population or regions.

During a catastrophic famine in the mid-1990s, North Korea suffered nearly a million deaths from hunger.

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