Search Results for “commission of inquiry”

October 23, 2016

Dec. 8th: Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity in N. Korean Political Prisons

As one who has played a small role in organizing this event, I’m pleased to announce it here at OFK: In my capacity as one of the co-organizers of the Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity in North Korean Political Prisons, I write to invite you to a groundbreaking hearing that will feature live testimony from three North Korean defectors: a former prisoner, a former prison guard, and a former official from the Ministry of People’s Security, which oversees North Korea’s...

Activism/Human Rights

October 6, 2014

Prediction: the Kaesong worker safety inquiry will be a whitewash.

You may recall that several weeks ago, some North Korean workers at Kaesong fell ill with symptoms of benzene poisoning. The bad news is that we still haven’t heard a peep of protests on the workers’ behalf from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, for some reason. The good news is that the Korean government cares enough about appearances to have ordered a safety inquiry: The South Korean government began a two-month probe Thursday into the working conditions at 33 factories in the...

Kaesong

April 22, 2014

N. Korea keeps it classy, calls Chair of U.N. Commission “a disgusting old lecher with 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality”

Last week, the Honorable Michael Kirby, a retired Justice of the High Court of Australia, and the Chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry for Human Rights in North Korea, was in Washington. It was my honor to be invited to two events with Justice Kirby — a small-group breakfast meeting (Kirby called this is a “barbarous” custom) hosted by the Australian Embassy, and a small-group dinner hosted by a member of the Board of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea....

"United" Nations/Human Rights/WTF?

February 17, 2014

U.N. Commission finds North Korea committed crimes against humanity, will recommend referral to the International Criminal Court

After years of apathy that not even accomplished appeaser Ban Ki-Moon could enforce, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry has released a devastating report accusing Kim Jong Un and his late father, Kim Jong Il, of crimes against humanity. You can download a summary report, or the long version, here. I will probably have more to say about the report in the coming days as I read it, but it’s clearly having an immediate and profound impact on the public discourse....

"United" Nations/Human Rights

November 22, 2013

U.N. Commission should find China responsible for crimes against humanity, too.

China is denying reports that it arrested 15 North Korean refugees near Kunming. According to the Chosun Ilbo, the refugees have been moved to areas near the North Korean border. Some may have been repatriated already, along with other refugees rounded up near Shenyang. If so, their fate inside North Korea is grim. As the Chinese government already knows, and has for years. I don’t know what, exactly, I should read from the fact that North Korea is loudly calling for China...

China/Refugees

September 18, 2013

U.N. Commissioner: N. Korean atrocities unlike any since the Khmer Rouge, Nazis

Reader Chris Beaumont* emailed me yesterday to draw my attention to the web site of the U.N. Commission on Inquiry on human rights abuses in North Korea. On this page, you can find links to videos of all of the Commission’s hearings in Seoul (English and Korean) and Tokyo (English and Japanese). I haven’t had time to review the complete record, but in this one, Shin Dong Hyok testifies about Camp 14 with the aid of Google Earth imagery. There...

Anju Links

March 14, 2013

What will a U.N. inquiry on N. Korean human rights actually mean?

The U.N. Human Rights Council is set to approve an inquiry into human rights conditions in North Korea, conditions that a U.N. investigator says “may” be crimes against humanity: Marzuki Darusman, an investigator for the United Nations, is expected to present a report to the council urging the creation of an international commission of inquiry to follow up on the abuses recorded in the eight years that a United Nations official has monitored human rights in the North. [N.Y. Times] So,...

"United" Nations/Human Rights

August 15, 2005

Christian Science Monitor Corrects Its Story on the Human Rights Commission

The online version of the Christian Science Monitor story, which originally stated that South Korea’s Human Rights Commission had endorsed calls to tear down MacArthur’s statue in Incheon, has been corrected: A complaint filed with the quasi-governmental National Human Rights Commission, which is reviewing the statue controversy, condemns MacArthur as “a war criminal who massacred numerous civilians.” The complaint adds, “To induce or force children to respect such a person by erecting a statue of him and teaching them that...

Uncategorized

April 30, 2023

British American Tobacco, North Korea, & the Bomb: Setting a New Low for How Evil a Tobacco Company Can Be

Last Tuesday, British American Tobacco, the world’s second-largest tobacco company, along with its Singaporean subsidiary, pled guilty to bank fraud and conspiracy charges and agreed to pay a combined $635 million in criminal and civil fines, penalties, and forfeitures to the Treasury and Justice Departments. The charges arise from an secret joint venture, going all the way back to 2001, in which BAT sold the North Korean government tobacco, other materials, machinery, and technical help to manufacture cigarettes, despite having said...

Money Laundering/NK Crime/U.S. Law

February 14, 2020

Huawei & North Korea: Reading between the lines of EDNY’s new indictment

HUAWEI, WHICH WAS PREVIOUSLY INDICTED FOR eleven counts of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, violations of Iran sanctions, and money laundering (plus criminal forfeiture counts) now finds itself hit with a superseding indictment for sixteen counts of similar allegations by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, or EDNY. I’ve always been impressed with the quality of EDNY’s work. It’s a plucky, underrated little office that sits resentfully in the shadow of its more prestigious and prideful neighbor in...

Money Laundering/U.S. Law

December 16, 2019

Review: Sandra Fahy, “Dying for Rights,” Columbia University Press, 2019

“In a penicillin bottle I wrote her date of birth, the day she died, and her name. I hung the bottle around her neck. I tied her hair. [The other prisoners and I] tied her legs. Her arms. We wrapped her body in a plastic bag. This is what happens in a prison camp in North Korea. That’s how we wrapped the dead bodies. When the warehouse has twenty dead bodies, we take those bodies to a place called the...

Books & Films

October 30, 2019

Report: Kim Jong-un starves his people, America blamed, women hardest hit

It has now been five years since a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found exhaustive evidence of Pyongyang’s culpability for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’” including “the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.” It has been less than a year since Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of witnesses to find that North Korea’s government has built a pervasive culture of rape, where officials prey on women with impunity. But now, a group...

Famine & Food Aid/Propaganda/Useful Idiocy

December 10, 2018

Rape, revenge, sanctions & North Korea’s hated Ministry of Love

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, Machiavelli mulled the question of whether a tyrant should seek to be feared or loved. The Ministry of State Security or MSS is North Korea’s analog to Orwell’s Ministry of Love,1 but in reality, it is Kim Jong-un’s most feared and hated enforcer. It targets “spies, subversive elements, and political criminals” — the people the state fears most. It runs North Korea’s most horrific prison camps, of which one North Korean woman interviewed secretly by the BBC said, “It is...

Human Rights/Resistance/Sanctions

February 14, 2018

The media fawning over North Korea’s Censor-in-Chief is indefensible, yet they still defend it.

A MEDIA CRITICISM OF DONALD TRUMP that weighs more heavily than their predictable policy and tribal differences with him is that his tepid repudiation of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer “normalized” some of America’s most deplorable people. It’s going to be much harder for the Washington Post to make that charge stick after its reporters fawned over one of Earth’s most deplorable people — the Censor-in-Chief of a racist, homophobic, misogynistic regime that stands credibly accused by the...

Censorship/Human Rights/Sports

December 11, 2017

Korean War II: A Hypothesis Explained, and a Fisking (Annotated)

(Update, May 2018: A hypothesis should to be tested by its predictive record. I’ve now watched, with growing alarm, how events since the publication of this post have validated it as a predictive model. I’ve recently gone back and embedded footnotes throughout, to indicate which specific predictions have been validated, or not.) In the last several months, as Pyongyang has revealed its progress toward acquiring the capacity to destroy an American city, the North Korea commentariat has cleaved into two...

Fiskings/Korean War II

November 3, 2017

How Congress forced the State Department to confront Pyongyang’s crimes against humanity

Last Friday’s post was not the first time I’ve criticized the Trump administration for the inadequacy of its recognition that America shares common interests with the North Korean people in a less murderous North Korean government. I’ve also criticized the inadequacy of the administration’s public diplomacy advocating for those common interests. Long-time readers know I also criticized the last president and the president before that one. But shortly after I published Friday’s post, as if on cue, the State Department issued...

Human Rights/Human Trafficking/Sanctions

September 20, 2017

Save North Korean Refugees Day: This Friday, September 22nd

What sort of place could be so horrible that a family of five would choose to die together rather than be sent there? The answer, of course, is this place, or this one, or this one, or this. Here is the story of a family that made that choice. A North Korean family of five, including a former senior official of the Workers Party, committed suicide last week after they were caught by Chinese police and faced deportation to the...

Refugees

June 14, 2017

One American tragedy, millions of North Korean statistics

The idea that foreign tourists in North Korea could escape the evil they help, however minimally, to propagate, was never sustainable. Tourism in North Korea reduces the physical and mental slavery of totalitarianism to a circus performance and its subjects to zoo animals. It doesn’t only endanger the tourist, it plays some unquantifiable role in sustaining that horrid system, and in endangering the lives of people from Seoul to Seattle to Aleppo by giving cash to a regime obsessed with the...

Foreigners in N. Korea

Search Results for: commission of inquiry