North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and other officials should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity committed in the authoritarian nation’s camps for poli
WASHINGTON – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and other officials should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity committed in the authoritarian nation’s camps for political prisoners, three renowned international jurists said Tuesday.
The jurists’ report is based on testimony from defectors and experts on the camps, believed to hold between 80,000 and 130,000 inmates. It cites evidence of systematic murder, including infanticide, and torture, persecution of Christians, rape, forced abortions, starvation and overwork leading to “countless deaths.”
The report, drafted with the International Bar Association’s support, is billed as an unofficial follow-up to a U. N. investigation in 2014 finding reasonable grounds to conclude crimes against humanity had been committed in North Korea.
The three judges have served on past international tribunals: Navi Pillay, a former U. N. high commissioner for human rights; Mark Harmon, who served on a tribunal trying Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia; and Thomas Buergenthal, who survived Auschwitz as a child and was a judge on the International Court of Justice.
North Korea “continues to deny the very existence of these political prisons,” the report says. “Yet, detailed satellite imagery, as well as the corroborated testimony of scores of former prisoners and state actors with firsthand knowledge of the prisons, established the existence of this prison system, and the horrific practices that occur therein, beyond any doubt.
