By John J. Metzler, June 1, 2025Speaking out to break the information barrier inside the hermetically sealed North Korean dictatorship is in itself nothing new, and usually quickly forgotten.
North Korean exiles, friendly governments and humanitarian organizations will periodically raise the oft forsaken banner of human rights only then to be confronted by realpolitik through another round of North Korean missile launches or nuclear proliferation.
Now for the first time, the full United Nations General Assembly held a high-level plenary meeting focused exclusively on human rights abuses in the quaintly titled Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea.
The session featured recent North Korean escapees, the reports of human rights monitors and national delegations.
For generations now the Korean people have been arbitrarily divided into a South/North separation. Just three years after the end of WWII, none other than Soviet dictator Josef Stalin personally selected Kim Il-Sung, a minor anti-Japanese resistance leader, to be the supreme leader of North Korea. That was in 1948; His family has ruled the northern portion of the Korean peninsula ever since in a bizarre form of Marxist dynasty, unseen anywhere in the world.
Elizabeth Salmon, the UN’s Special Representative for Human Rights in North Korea stated unambiguously:
“For over five years, people in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been living in absolute isolation. The government’s excessive measures, placed during the Covid-19 pandemic, worsened an already dire human rights situation in the country.”
The UN’s Special Rapporteur warned that the country is “facing the worst humanitarian crisis since the disastrous famine in the late 1990’s.”
But the highlights of the hearing were two North Korean escapees; Gyuri Kang, 24, who fled North Korea in 2023 aboard a small wooden boat with her mother and aunt, described how the regime publicly executed people for watching or distributing South Korean dramas. Ms. Kang told delegates:
“Three of my friends were publicly executed, two were killed for distributing South Korean dramas. One was just 19 years old.”
In 2020, the Pyongyang regime passed the Anti-Reactionary Ideology and Culture Act, imposing harsh penalties, including death, for watching or distributing foreign media.
The other speaker, Ms. Eun-Joo Kim, who escaped North Korea in 1999 at age 12, recounted an escape with her mother and sister into China only then to be faced with exploitation and human trafficking.
North Korea’s Amb. Song Kim, strongly condemned the meeting as a “political scheme” in the Assembly while calling the Korean escapees the “scum of the earth.” He claimed the session was aimed to undermine the DPRK’s “dignity.”
A delegate from Lithuania, speaking on behalf of the Baltic states warned of an entrenched humanitarian crisis paralleling the political crackdowns. “The prolonged closure of the DPRK’s borders by regime of North Korea has significantly exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis. Food insecurity has reached its gravest level in decades: the World Food Programme estimates that 10.7 million people, more than 40 per cent of the population, are under-nourished.”
Japan’s UN Amb. Yamazaki Kazuyuki, added that the “situation in the DPRK underscored that its human rights violations are also inextricably linked with the building up of its military capabilities, including the pursuit of unlawful WMD and ballistic missile programs.”
Riley Barnes, speaking for the United States stressed, “The suffering of the North Korean people is not incidental, it is systemic, coordinated, methodical, and organized.” He added, “The people of North Korea deserve support in their struggle to exercise their human rights and fundamental freedoms and in seeking safety from abuse and oppression.”
Nonetheless the Assembly debate witnessed pushback from Pyongyang’s allies among them Russia, China, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The DPRK remains a dystopian society where social services, food production and free movement are perpetually restricted at the expense of a modernizing military state.
Only recently, DPRK dictator Kim Jong-Un, the third member of his family to run the secretive state since 1948, was again accompanied at an official function by his teenage daughter Kim Ju-Ae who may be being groomed as a possible heir-apparent and signifies plans for political continuity in the communist state.
But as the defector Eun-Joo Kim pleaded to UN delegates to take action; “Please do not turn away from the innocent lives being lost in North Korea and elsewhere. Silence is complicity.”
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014). [See pre-2011 Archives]
