By Josh Smith
SEOUL (Reuters) -A decade after a landmark U.N. report concluded North Korea committed crimes against humanity, a U.N. official investigating rights in the isolated state told Reuters many abuses continue, exacerbated by COVID-era controls that have yet to be lifted.
James Heenan, who represents the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, said he is still surprised by the continued prevalence of executions, forced labour and reports of starvation in the authoritarian country.
Later this year Heenan’s team will release a follow-up report to the 2014 findings by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which said the government had committed “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations” that constituted crimes against humanity.
DPRK is North Korea’s official name.
While the conclusions of this year’s report are still being finalised, Heenan told Reuters in an interview that the last 10 years have seen mixed results, with North Korea’s government engaging more with some international institutions, but doubling down on control at home.
“The post-COVID period for DPRK means a period of much greater government control over people’s lives and restrictions on their freedoms,” he said in the interview.
North Korea’s embassy in London did not answer phone calls seeking comment. The government has in the past denied abuses and accused the U.N. and foreign countries of trying to use human rights as a political weapon to attack North Korea.
A Reuters investigation in 2023 found leader Kim Jong Un had spent much of the COVID pandemic building a massive string of walls and fences along the previously porous border with China, and later built fences around the capital of Pyongyang.
A report this week by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said the COVID pandemic raged in North Korea for more than two years before the regime admitted in May 2022 that the virus had permeated its borders, and that the regime bungled the response in a way that violated freedoms and left most citizens to fend for themselves.
On Wednesday SI Analytics, a Seoul-based satellite imagery firm, released a report noting North Korea is renovating a key prison camp near the border with China, possibly in response to international criticism, while simultaneously strengthening physical control over prisoners under the pretence of facility improvement.
Heenan said his team has talked to more than 300 North Koreans who fled their country in recent years, and many expressed despair.
“Sometimes we hear people saying they sort of hope a war breaks out, because that might change things,” he said.
A number of those interviewees will speak publicly for the first time next week as part of an effort to put a human face on the U.N. findings.
“It’s a rare opportunity to hear from people publicly what they want to say about what’s happening in the DPRK,” Heenan said.
He expressed concern about funding cuts for international aid and U.N. programmes around the world, which is pressuring human rights work and threatening support for North Korean refugees.
While human rights has traditionally been a politically volatile subject not only for Pyongyang but for foreign governments trying to engage with the nuclear-armed North, Heenan said the issues like prison camps need to be part of any engagement on a political settlement.
“There’s no point self-censoring on human rights, because… no one’s fooled,” he said.
(Reporting by Josh Smith; Editing by Michael Perry)
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