U.N. Special Rapporteur Calls on China to Stop Repatriating NK Refugees

There is no cause to bash the U.N. this time; Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn was clear and direct, taking a first step toward redeeming the U.N.’s miserable performance on North Korea thus far:

China should stop repatriating North Koreans who flee their country and give them refugee status instead, a UN human rights envoy said on Monday. . . . “The people coming from North Korea are not just hunger cases but they are more than hunger cases because they fear persecution upon return,” Vitit told a meeting on migrants and refugee issues in the Malaysian capital. “It’s just not hunger, it’s the fear factor.”

China is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Refugees, which mandates humane treatment of refugees. But Beijing, Pyongyang’s only significant ally, says the North Koreans on its soil are economic migrants, not refugees. China sends many North Koreans home, while quietly letting those involved in high-profile cases go to South Korea through third countries, mostly in Southeast Asia. But those transit countries have followed China in cracking down, activists say.

“Many of these people would be refugees and they should be dealt with accordingly,” Vitit told reporters at the meeting, organized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

My only quibble with Vitit–and it’s a modest one–is that he makes any distinction between political and economic migrants at all; after all, numerous reports have told us that North Korea’s distribution of economic resources is inextricably linked to an individual’s political “class.”

Second to China itself, it’s the media who haven’t adequately covered this story who are blameworthy here. Would there have been more coverage if another U.N. rep had termed the Gitmo inmates “prisoners of war?” Anyone who doubts that should be prepared to explain.