Human Trafficking in [North Korea Street Children in [North Korea] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [North Korea] [other countries] |
Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) [ Country-by-Country
Reports ] The Democratic People's The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
(D.P.R.K. or North Korea) is a source country for
men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and
commercial sexual exploitation. The most common form of trafficking involves
North Korean women and girls who cross the border into the People’s Republic
of China (P.R.C.) voluntarily. Many of them are
from North Hamgyong province, one of the poorest
provinces in the country, located near the Chinese border. Once in the P.R.C., they find themselves in difficult legal and
financial circumstances, are picked up by traffickers, and sold as brides to PRC nationals, usually of Korean ethnicity. In other
cases, North Korean women and girls are lured out of North Korea to escape
poor social and economic conditions by the promise of food, jobs, and
freedom, only to be forced into prostitution, marriage, or exploitative labor
arrangements once in the P.R.C. While many women
trafficked into China are sold as brides, some North Korean women in China
are forced into prostitution, usually in brothels. The illegal status of
North Koreans in the P.R.C. and other Southeast
Asian countries increases their vulnerability to trafficking for purposes of
forced labor and sexual exploitation. NGOs estimate that tens of thousands of
North Koreans presently live in China, more than half of whom are women;
however, there is no reliable information on how many of these North Koreans
are or have been trafficked. Within the D.P.R.K.,
forced labor continues to be part of an established system of political
repression. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 persons in political prison camps
are subjected to reeducation through labor, by logging, mining, and crop
tending. Reports indicated that conditions in camps for political prisoners
are extremely harsh, and many prisoners are not expected to survive. The D.P.R.K. regime recruits an estimated 10,000 to 15,000
North Korean contract workers to fill highly sought-after jobs overseas for D.P.R.K. entities and foreign firms. While there is no
evidence of force, fraud, or coercion in the recruitment process, there are
continued reports that North Koreans sent abroad may be employed in harsh
conditions, with their freedom of movement and communication restricted.
There are concerns that this labor may be exploitative, since their salaries
are deposited into accounts controlled by the North Korean government.
Countries in which North Koreans work through such arrangements reportedly
include Russia, Romania, Libya, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, Angola, Mongolia,
Kuwait, Yemen, Iraq and China. The North Korean government recently signed an
agreement with Mongolia that will send up to 5,300 North Korean laborers to
Mongolia over the next five years. North Korean workers at joint ventures
within the D.P.R.K. are employed under arrangements
similar to those that apply to overseas contract workers. - U.S. State Dept
Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2008 [full country
report] |
|
|
CAUTION: The following links have been
culled from the web to illuminate the situation in ***
FEATURED ARTICLE *** Nor is it breaking news that North
Korea operates a vicious prison gulag -- "not unlike the worst labor
camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century," as NBC News reported
more than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are held in these
slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of others have perished in them over
the years. Some of the camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their
prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can be of any age:
North Korea's longstanding policy is to imprison not only those accused of
such "crimes" as practicing Christianity or complaining about North
Korean life, but their entire families, grandparents and grandchildren
included. ***
ARCHIVES *** Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005 TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS – There
were no known laws specifically addressing the problem of trafficking in
persons, and trafficking of women and young girls into and within Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2004 [62] The Committee notes the lack
of information in the State party report on human trafficking, in particular,
involving children. US
lashes out at NKorea's "horrendous" human
rights record Tens of thousands of North Koreans,
fleeing hunger or repression at home, have travelled
across the border to China in recent years.
But China has an agreement with its close ally to repatriate them as
economic migrants, a policy strongly criticized by refugee aid and human
rights groups. Returnees can face
harsh punishment including jail terms and forced labour
and even death, according to rights groups. North Korean women crossing the
border into China are generally "most vulnerable" to trafficking
given their illegal status in China and their inability to return home, he
said. Amnesty International said it
had documented cases of North Korean women being lured from their homes and
trafficked as "sex slaves" into China, where they are sold as
brides in forced marriages. Victims
of Human Trafficking Speak WOMEN WHO ARE SOLD INTO SLAVERY - Ms. G (age: 26), a former nurse
from the North who made it across the border to China in February was appalled
after she was sold to a family. She was the only woman in the house with
62-year-old father, 32 year-old oldest son and other three men. Her worst
fears turned into reality when the father and four sons each demanded her to
share their bed every night. She was forced to go through this ordeal, even
when she was sick or had her period. She did not have anyone to turn to,
because there was not even a village nearby. She put up with this life for
about eight months. North
Korea exporting workers into lives of slavery GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT - Almost the entire monthly
salaries of the women here, about $260, the Czech minimum wage, are deposited
directly in an account controlled by the North Korean government, which gives
them only a fraction of the money. To
the extent that they are allowed outside in this village 20 miles west of The refugees forced to be sex slaves in China The women who flee North Korea
believe nothing could be worse than their dictatorship's famine and labor
camps. But many change their minds
after they cross the Most of the patients in the
hospitals suffer from psychosomatic illnesses. They’re worn out by compulsory
drills, innumerable parades, mandatory assemblies beginning at the crack of
dawn, and constant, droning propaganda. They are tired and at the end of
their tether. Clinical depression is rampant. Alcoholism is common. Young
adults have no hope, no future. Everywhere you look, people are beset by
anxiety. North
Korea's horrors cannot be tolerated By the best estimates, between 2
million and 3 million North Koreans starved to death during the 1990s.
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have been confined in a network of
brutal forced-labor camps. The world now has sufficient eyewitness accounts
and other documentary evidence to conclude beyond any doubt that these camps
are the scenes of horrific crimes – summary execution, torture, privation and
abuse on a hideous scale, forced abortions and infanticide, and more. The Hidden
Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY - This report
outlines two distinct systems of repression: first, a North Korean gulag2
of forced-labor colonies, camps, and prisons where scores of thousands of
prisoners — some political, some convicted felons — are worked, many to their
deaths, in mining, logging, farming, and industrial enterprises, often in
remote valleys located in the mountainous areas of North Korea; and second, a
system of smaller, shorter-term detention facilities along the North
Korea–China border used to brutally punish North Koreans who flee to China —
usually in search of food during the North Korean famine crisis of the middle
to late 1990s — but are arrested by Chinese police and forcibly repatriated
to the DPRK. Worse Than 1984
- North Korea, slave state In Freedom
House Country Report - Political Rights: 7 Civil Liberties: 7 Status: Not Free Human Rights Overview by Human
Rights Watch – Defending Human Rights Worldwide U.S. Library of Congress
- Country Study Nor is it breaking news that North
Korea operates a vicious prison gulag -- "not unlike the worst labor
camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century," as NBC News reported
more than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are held in these
slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of others have perished in them over
the years. Some of the camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their
prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can be of any age:
North Korea's longstanding policy is to imprison not only those accused of
such "crimes" as practicing Christianity or complaining about North
Korean life, but their entire families, grandparents and grandchildren
included. The Democidal Famine In North Korea This is not all. In this
"classless" communist society, the regime has divided North Koreans
into a rigid hierarchy of three classes, and fifty-one subdivisions,
depending on a person's status within the communist North Korean Workers Party
and the military, their perceived faithfulness to communism, and family
backgrounds. In other words, Kim uses the very food people need to live as a
tool to reward and punish his subject slaves. Thus, vast numbers of people
whose loyalties are questioned or may be deemed useless to the regime do not
receive enough food to live long. The worst off are those people and families
incarcerated in Kim's concentration or forced labor camps. They receive the
lowest food allowance of all, in spite of their being forced to work from 5
am to 8 pm. ILLEGAL WORK - They seek work - perhaps in
mines, factories or cattle farms - but are often swindled out of their
earnings. A mine owner might promise
them 500 yuan a month, but actually they are paid
less than half, or nothing at all - forced into acquiescence by the fear of
being reported to the authorities. the
horrifying situation in North Korea I've been reading about the gulags
of North Korea, in which an estimated 400,000 people have died since 1972. Up
to 200,000 people are still imprisoned there today, according to this report.
When a person is accused of a political crime, they and their family are sent
to the camps. There is also a policy of infanticide and forced abortions in
the prison camps. Grim
fate for N. Korean prisoners Hidden in the valleys between high
mountains in the northern provinces of North Korea lies one of the country's
darkest secrets -- political penal labor prisons. Behind the walls of a Kwan-li-so conditions and treatment are brutal. "People are starved to death, worked
to death, frozen to death over a period of time, and it's just absolutely
horrific, reminiscent of what we've read coming out of the old Gulags under
Stalin," says Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback. Along with political prisoners, up to three
generations of their families also are banished without trial -- usually for
lifetime sentences in a system of "guilt by association," the
report finds. Opening
a Window on North Korea's Horrors Han, a Communist Party official in
North Korea, was walking home from work when he heard he was in trouble. He
had smuggled a radio back from China after an official trip. He listened to
it late at night, huddled with earphones on and shades drawn, to hear music
that brought him a whisper of sanity and took him away from the horrors of
his day. Now, someone had found it, or
someone had told. If a farmer or laborer had a
radio, he could have been released," Han said. "But I was an
official. In my case, it would have been torture and a life sentence in a
political prisoners' camp." It's the totalitarian aspect that
strikes you first, as it did me when I visited North Korea last winter. Fifty
years of ultra-Stalinism have made the very idea of a private life almost
unthinkable. Every move and utterance is planned and scripted, with an entire
people endlessly mobilized for a cult of hysterical adulation. The president
of the country is a dead man named Kim Il Sung, whose rotund visage glares
from every wall. All other official leadership posts are held by his son Kim Jong Il, whose birth is said to have been attended by
miraculous signs and portents. All films, all books, all newspapers and all
radio and television broadcasts are about either the Father or the Son.
Everybody is a soldier. Everybody is an informer. Everybody is a unit.
Everything is propaganda. Human rights are nonexistent.
Peasants, slaves to the regime, lead lives of utter destitution. It is as if a
basic right to exist--to be--is denied. Ordinary people starve and die. They
are detained at the caprice of the regime. Forced labor is the basic way in
which "order" is maintained. All material used herein
reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC §
107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use |
|
Human Trafficking in [North Korea Street Children in [North Korea] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [North Korea] [other countries]