North Korea Faces Review by U.N. Human Rights Council

And here’s a sample of what the council will hear:

In the course of beatings, the guards broke all his teeth, leaving him toothless for four years. To deprive him of sleep, the guards at the underground prison at Hoeryong city near the Chinese border used “pigeon torture”. Jung was handcuffed and tied by his arms to an object behind him so he could not stand or sit. He felt as though his bones were breaking through his chest while the rest of his body was paralysed. [The Guardian]

Someone really should tell those neocons at the Guardian that George W. Bush isn’t President anymore. We’ve entered a new age in which unpleasant rhetoric has been replaced by the quiet-yet-decisive action of effective international institutions headed by fearless moral paragons.

Update: More here:

At intervals, he would be taken down and asked to confess. When he refused, he was hung back on the wall. He begged, unsuccessfully, to be allowed to use a toilet. “It was July when I was arrested,” he said. “I was wearing short sleeves and weighed 71 kilos. When I finally gave a false confession to end it, it was winter. I was freezing. I weighed 36 kilos.”

The human rights organisation Christian Solidarity Worldwide believes that statements like Mr Jung’s, along with the material collected by human rights organisations in anticipation of the Human Rights Council’s review, prove that the international community is duty-bound to establish an international commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity in North Korea — ranging from routine degradation of women to the torture of political prisoners and persecution of Christians. [….]

Lee Sung Ae (not her real name) is one such Christian. She told The Times that her husband died of malnutrition. When it began to look certain that her four young children would follow him, she fled into China, where she was converted to Christianity and given aid to return.

She had converted a small circle of friends before a suspicious neighbour called the police and she was arrested. “They pulled out my nails, one by one,” she said. “And then they started on my teeth.” They were trying, she said, to extract the names of those she had converted but she refused.

Without a trial, she was sentenced to four years in a re-education camp. Worse than the starvation she endured there, was the fear she felt for her children. “I felt like my heart was bleeding for them”, she said. “When someone goes into a gulag, all their possessions are reposed. My children, made homeless, begged on the streets for two years before fleeing to China. The eldest was fifteen, the youngest seven. Soldiers keep up a 24 hour patrol along the border but sometimes they have to take short breaks. That’s when the boys fled for their lives.” One later died, she said, at the hands of the police when they made a brief return to North Korea. [Times Online]

I wonder if people like Christine Ahn really believe that these people left their homeland, their abundant food rations, and their free health care just to make up fables designed to provoke a Yankee invasion, or if they just deny things like this because that’s what people do when they love peace.

Why do I get the idea that if Khalid Sheikh Mohammad were talking, they’d believe every word?