Conclusions:
1. Systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and
are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , its
institutions and officials. In many instances, the violations of human rights
found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity. These are not mere
excesses of the State; they are essential components of a political system that
has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded. The gravity,
scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any
parallel in the contemporary world. Political scientists of the twentieth century
characterized this type of political organization as a totalitarian State: a State
that does not content itself with ensuring the authoritarian rule of a small
group of people, but seeks to dominate every aspect of its citizens’ lives and
terrorizes them from within.
2. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea displays many attributes of a
totalitarian State: the rule of a single party, led by a single person, is
based on an elaborate guiding ideology that its current Supreme Leader refers
to as “Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism”. The State seeks to ensure that its citizens
internalize this guiding ideology by indoctrinating citizens from childhood,
suppressing all political and religious expression that questions the official
ideology, and tightly controlling citizens’ physical movement and their means
of communication with each other and with those in other countries.
Discrimination on the basis of gender and songbun
is used to maintain a rigid social structure that is less likely to produce
challenges to the political system.
3. The State’s monopolization of access to food has been used as an
important means to enforce political loyalty. The distribution of food has
prioritized those who are useful to the survival of the current political
system at the expense of those deemed to be expendable. Citizens’ complete
dependence on the State led to one of the worst cases of famine in recent
history. The authorities have only recently come to tolerate the fact that
markets can no longer be fully suppressed. Instead of fully embracing reforms
to realize the right to food, however, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea maintains
a system of inefficient economic production and discriminatory resource
allocation that inevitably produces more unnecessary starvation among its
citizens.
4. The key to the political system is the vast political and security
apparatus that strategically uses surveillance, coercion, fear and punishment
to preclude the expression of any dissent. Public executions and enforced
disappearance to political prison camps serve as the ultimate means to
terrorize the population into submission. The State’s violence has been
externalized through State-sponsored abductions and enforced disappearances of
people from other nations. These international enforced disappearances are
unique in their intensity, scale and nature.
5. Today, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea finds itself surrounded by a
world that is changing rapidly in political, economic and technological terms.
These changes offer opportunities for incremental social change within the
State. In response, the authorities engage in gross human rights violations so
as to crack down on “subversive” influences from abroad. These influences are
symbolized by films and soap operas from the Republic of Korea
and other countries, short-wave radio broadcasts and foreign mobile telephones.
For the same reason, the State systematically uses violence and punishment to
deter its citizens from exercising their human right to leave the country.
Persons who are forcibly repatriated from China are commonly subjected to
torture, arbitrary detention, summary execution, forced abortion and other forms
of sexual violence.
6. A number of long-standing and ongoing patterns of systematic and
widespread violations, which were documented by the commission, meet the high
threshold required for proof of crimes against humanity in international law.
The perpetrators enjoy impunity. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is
unwilling to implement its international obligation to prosecute and bring the
perpetrators to justice, because those perpetrators act in accordance with
State policy.
7. The fact that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as a State Member
of the United Nations, has for decades pursued policies involving crimes that
shock the conscience of humanity raises questions about the inadequacy of the
response of the international community. The international community must
accept its responsibility to protect the people of the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea from
crimes against humanity, because the Government of the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea
has manifestly failed to do so. In particular, this responsibility must be
accepted in the light of the role played by the international community (and by
the great powers in particular) in the division of the Korean peninsula and
because of the unresolved legacy of the Korean War. These unfortunate legacies
help not only to explain the intractability of the human rights situation but
also why an effective response is now imperative.
8. The United Nations must ensure that those most responsible for the
crimes against humanity committed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are held
accountable. Options to achieve this end include a Security Council referral of
the situation to the International Criminal Court or the establishment of an ad
hoc tribunal by the United Nations. Urgent accountability measures should be
combined with a reinforced human rights dialogue, the promotion of incremental
change through more people-to-people contact and an inter-Korean agenda for reconciliation.
Fuente: Naciones Unidas.
Fuente: Naciones Unidas.