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.

Importantly the Special Rapporteur stressed that “food aid alone was never adequate, and it had to accompanied by food security.” Plans by the Pyongyang regime to force people to work on farms for a “food battle” with intensive labor, did not insure either production or a sharing in the harvest.

The authorities regularly clamp down on civilians tying to privately grow or sell produce outside the confines of the state sanctioned system.

Despite the DPRK's horrific human rights situation, diplomats for the most part have soft-peddled these charges and evidence so as not to try to antagonize Pyongyang over its sporadic cooperation on the nuclear weapons issues. Thus while the U.N. Security Council has tried to contain Pyongyang's nuclear proliferation, there has been a reserved reticence to tackle the North on its very vulnerable human rights record.

A few years ago, a high profile effort was launched at the U.N., sponsored by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and endorsed by former Czech President Vaclav Havel, to bring the issue before the U.N. Security Council. Naturally this strategy while logical, is hindered by the fact that the People's Republic of China has historically supported the DPRK despite disagreements in recent years. Thus the Security Council option could offer a dead end to any serious censure to Pyongyang over humanitarian issues.

While many democracies, including South Korea under its previous government, have politely averted their attention from human rights abuses in the North, the political rationalization was usually based not on sympathy, but on realpolitik in getting Kim Jong Il's regime to offer minimal levels of cooperation on the nuclear issues, to provide some sort of limited openness for the hermetically-closed country, and to encourage Seoul's “Sunshine Policy” of subsidizing the DPRK's tacit cooperation.

Specific charges will be presented at the U.N. Human Rights Council in December. That moment likely can't come soon enough for millions of North Koreans who cannot speak for themselves.

John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. jjmcolumn@att.net