The regime of North Korea was at the center of the last session of the UN Security Council in which the situation of fundamental rights in the territory was evaluated and which ended with important complaints, at a time when Pyongyang is increasingly carrying out missile tests.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, ruled after analyzing reports and testimonies from defectors that Kim Jong-un’s regime abuses its citizens with the cruelest tactics to “support the military apparatus and its capacity to produce weapons” while they die of hunger or lack of medicines and basic resources.
“Many violations (…) support the growth of militarization” of North Korea, he told the Council and explained that among these violations are the forced labor -including that of political prisoners and schoolchildren in harvests-, the confiscation of wages of workers abroad and the lack of freedom of expression, thought, religion or assembly.
All of them, he added, are usually “sanctioned with extrajudicial executions,” which is yet another example of the brutality of the dictator’s maneuvers whose only interest seems to be his military strengthening with which to intimidate the international community.
Added to these denunciations was the warning from the High Commissioner about the suffocating citizen control that governs the daily life of people and prevents them from living in peace.
“Government surveillance of its citizens, at home and abroad, has grown with an intensity rarely seen in other countries. The right to privacy is systematically violated, houses are subject to random searches, and neighbors and relatives are encouraged to denounce each other, ”he explained in this regard.
Ilhyeok Kim, a young deserter, participated in the meeting and narrated in first person the horrors, the “isolation” and the “punishments” that, together with his family, he had to live in the country to, with “blood and sweat” sustain “the luxurious life of the leaders”. She even recounted how a sister of her father who stayed in the country was detained and tortured for months for not having denounced her flight plans.
“With the cost of a North Korean missile, the government could feed the people for three months,” he then added about another of the main problems that citizens must overcome.
Pyongyang’s secrecy led the country to remain, for years, isolated from the world and only maintain contact with those allied nations -as Russia and China-. However, with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the regime decided to take its measures to extremes and completely close the border in order to avoid a health crisis -or, perhaps, due to its inability to respond to it-.
Since then, little has changed in terms of contact with the outside world and, inside the country, the situation has only worsened.
A report from National Intelligence Service (NIS) of South Korea exposed that the widespread food shortages worsened and its neighbor to the north would be facing an approximate shortage of 800,000 tons of rice. This is due to the droughts in the area, the import substitution measures and the reduction in food production that the regime refuses to suspend.
Likewise, satellite images from 2022 revealed that Pyongyang produced 180,000 tons less food than the previous year, which explains that close to 42% of the population suffer some degree of malnutritionaccording to UN analysis.
In response, the Council adopted a series of measures and sanctions in 2006 that were reinforced three times in 2017. Most of them fall on oil imports.
However, the imposition of more restrictions seems increasingly difficult given the presence of the Chinese and Russian delegations in the body, which veto new resolutions and condemn statements against their ally.
Even during this last session, both representatives took the floor and repudiated the statements of their peers. The deputy ambassador of Beijing, Geng Shuang, assured that they exceeded the limits of their functions and statements since this “does not pose a threat to international peace and security” while Russian Dmitry Polyanskiy called the meeting a “shameful attempt to politicize the Council”. It is an act of “Western hypocrisy” and “provocation,” she concluded.
For her part, the US ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, lamented this protection between countries that prevents abusers from being held accountable for their abuses.
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Source-www.infobae.com