North Korean defectors call on UN to try Kim Jong-un for crimes against humanity

Two women who fled North Korea have addressed the United Nations and asked them to try dictator Kim Jong-un for crimes against humanity.

Eunju Kim, who escaped starvation in North Korea in 1999, then was sent back from and fled a second time, told the United Nations that the country’s leader must be held accountable for gross human rights violations.

She said her father died of starvation, and she told UN diplomats that after making it to China across the Tumen River the first time, she, her mother and sister were sold for the equivalent of less than $300 to a Chinese man. Three years later, they were arrested and sent back to the North. In 2002, they escaped again across the river.

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Gyuri Kang, whose family faced persecution for her grandmother’s religious beliefs, fled the North during the COVID-19 pandemic.

She told the General Assembly that three of her friends were executed, two for watching South Korean TV dramas.

At the high-level meeting of the 193-member body, the two women, both now living in South Korea, described the plight of North Koreans who UN special investigator Elizabeth Salmón said have been living in “absolute isolation” since the pandemic began in early 2020.

Thousands of North Koreans have fled the country since the late 1990s, but the numbers have dwindled drastically in recent years.

Ms Salmón said North Korea’s closure of its borders worsened an already dire human rights situation, with new laws enacted since 2020 and stricter punishments, including the death penalty and public executions.

In another rights issue, she said, the deployment of North Korean troops to support in its war against has raised concerns about “the poor human rights conditions of its soldiers while in service, and the government’s widespread exploitation of its own people.”

The North’s “extreme militarisation” enables it to keep the population under surveillance and it exploits the work force through a state-controlled system that finances its expanding nuclear program and military ventures, Ms Salmón said.

North Korea’s UN ambassador Kim Song called the allegations that his country violates human rights “a burlesque of intrigue and fabrication” and insisted that tens of millions of North Koreans enjoy human rights under the country’s socialist system.

He accused the West of being the bigger violator, through racial discrimination, human trafficking and sexual slavery.