Defectors from North Korea caught by secret police
Over 100 North Korean defectors have been caught by the country’s secret police and gone missing according to a Seoul-based human rights group. They had attempted to flee the isolated country or attempted to call family in South Korea.
The Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) released a report which details patterns of ‘enforced disappearances.’ This is through its study based on interviews with 62 North Koreans who escaped to the south. 113 defectors were identified by the TJWG in 66 disappearance cases.
Tens of thousands of North Koreans are believed to have defected since 1953 when an armistice put an end to the Korean War. Many of those caught are sent to prison camps or other detention facilities.
Of the 113, 90 of them were arrested within North Korea with the rest being captured in China or Russia. Under half of them went missing after being caught trying to flee while a quarter took responsibility for another family member’s crime. Just under a tenth were accused of communicating with those in South Korea or other countries.
The UN estimates that up to 200,000 people are held in North Korea’s vast network of gulags, many of them being political prisoners. A UN Commission of Inquiry report in 2014 said that they faced torture, forced labour, starvation, and other inhumane treatments.
Pyongyang has denounced defectors as “human scum” with the government further tightening restrictions over the past few years. The North’s Korea Association for Human Rights Studies has rejected a UN report on its human rights abuses such as forced disappearances. It labelled them “fabrications” and a Western conspiracy to escalate confrontation and tarnish the nation’s image.
Beijing meanwhile denies the existence of any North Korean defectors in China, describing them as illegal economic migrants.
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