‘North Korea rights abuse is world’s moment of truth’

UNITED NATIONS – Prisoners held in stress positions, people starved so much they are forced to eat snakes and mice, carts of rotting bodies – will the world just turn its back on the atrocities of North Korea?

Renowned Australian judge Michael Kirby raised this question as he urged the United Nations to adopt a resolution referring North Korea’s human rights abuses to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The chairman of a UN commission that produced a groundbreaking report on Pyongyang’s human rights record said world leaders should not be swayed by what he called a “charm offensive” of the reclusive state to evade accountability.

“The question is whether in the coming weeks, the United Nations will meet its moment of truth, whether the United Nations will stay the course and make accountability for great crimes, crimes against humanity a reality,” Kirby said at a press briefing at the UN Headquarters in New York on Wednesday, October 22.

Kirby was referring to a resolution that Japan and the European Union drafted for the UN Security Council to adopt the Commission of Inquiry’s recommendation and refer North Korea to the Hague-based ICC. 

Through public testimonies of former prisoners, guards and witnesses, the commission published a gripping, detailed report in February that found that North Korea committed crimes including “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, rape, and persecution.”

Kirby noted that in response to the report, North Korea launched a “charm offensive” by having its top officials engage with world leaders, producing its own “rosy” report on its human rights record, drafting a resolution to counter the Japan-EU initiative, and reopening dialogue with South Korea. 

“North Korea went on a charm offensive, a country that once treated human rights with disdain. It used to ignore it or attack those who companied but such was the impact of this UN Commission of Inquiry that North Korea was wrong-footed, shocked at the response of the international community to the human rights report,” Kirby said.

Analysts also noted that the Tuesday release of Jeffrey Fowle, one of 3 Americans detained in North Korea, coincided with this charm offensive.

Yet questions remain about whether or not the Security Council, the UN’s most powerful organ, will adopt the resolution considering that North Korea’s close ally China is a permanent member of the body and has veto power.

The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council endorsed the report, but with China, Russia, Vietnam, Venezuela, Cuba and Pakistan voting against it.  

Kirby was optimistic that Beijing will allow the resolution to pass in the Security Council. He noted that China rarely used its veto power, only 10 times compared to the 100 times that the US did.

“I don’t think [a veto] should be assumed. I don’t think background briefings and so on are quite the same as decisions that are made in that beautiful chamber. An example is the vote taken by the Security Council on the MH17 question. That was a question extremely close to the geopolitical interests of Russia and yet, with concessions and wording and changes, steps were taken to get a resolution.”

Kirby added, “China is a great power, and has great responsibility as a permanent member. Veto is not the way China does international diplomacy. China tends to find another way.”

‘Comparing apples to hippopotamus’

The justice also responded to statements of North Korea’s Ambassador to the UN Jang Il Hun that there will be “countermeasures” if the UN refers its leader Kim Jong-Un to the ICC.

Jang told the Council on Foreign Relations that Pyongyang was willing to “compromise on some issues” if the UN deletes sections in the General Assembly draft resolution on the ICC referral.

Kirby said the UN should not yield to the threat, and instead live up to its charter and the principles of universal human rights.

“It does sound a little menacing …. I hope the UN will not back away because the bottom line is we have this report with the very clear testimony of believable witnesses of great wrongs and [just] because an ambassador says, ‘We will make responses to that,’ that the United Nations of the world backs off.”

If the resolution does not prosper, Kirby said the commission recommended an alternative: setting up a UN field office in South Korea that would collect the testimonies of more witnesses.

He said this is preferable compared to creating an ad hoc tribunal, whose work might be “slow and internal” and involve biased North Korean judges.

Asked about the possibility North Korea will reject the proposal on the grounds of South Korea’s own rights abuses, Kirby said: “I kept an eye on developments in the region but they are immaterial to the enormity, awfulness, and personal testimony of very great wrongs over a very great period [in North Korea].”

“We’re not comparing apples to apples. We’re comparing apples to hippopotamus,” he quipped. 

‘Let world check NKorea claims’

Kirby pointed out that in response to the UN report, North Korea admitted to having labor camps for the first time but preferred to call them “reform centers.”

North Korea has also trumpetted its supposed positive human rights record like granting people political freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Pyongyang sought to discredit the witnesses who cooperated with the UN, calling them “human scum” and claiming that they received bribes.

Kirby said North Korea should let the world see where the truth lies.

“Our answer is go to the Internet. You can go now and just look at these people. They are people who in our judgment are truthful, even understating what they went through,” he said referring to the testimonies posted online.

“Let people see if [North Koreans] are still starving, their bodies put on wheelbarrows, reduced to ashes, and the ashes put on nearby fields for fertilizers.”

The commission’s chairman compared North Korea’s abuses to a dark period of human history.

“I am old enough to have lived through the revelations of World War II when General [Dwight] Eisenhower opened up the terrible camps in Europe. I never thought it would fall to me to sit in an inquiry that heard testimony of that kind,” Kirby said. – Rappler.com  

Rappler multimedia reporter Ayee Macaraig is a 2014 fellow of the Dag Hammarskjöld Fund for Journalists. She is in New York to cover the UN General Assembly, foreign policy, diplomacy, and world events.