North Korean justice system treats persons as 'less than animals': Human Rights Watch
19 October, 2020
Torture, humiliation and coerced confessions are rampant in North Korea's pretrial detention system which treats persons as worth "significantly less than an animal", a rights group said Monday (Oct 19) in a written report on the country's opaque legal processes.
US-based Human Rights Watch drew on interviews with a large number of former North Korean detainees and officials to highlight what it called inhuman conditions at detention facilities that often amount to torture.
Nuclear-armed North Korea, accused of widespread rights abuses by the United Nations and other critics, is a "closed" country and little is well known about its criminal justice system.
Mistreatment of detainees - beating with a stick or kicking - was "especially harsh" in the first stages of pretrial detention, interviewees said.
"The regulations say there must not be any beatings, but we need confessions through the investigation and early stages of the preliminary examination," a former official said.
"So you need to hit them to get the confession."
Former detainees said these were forced to sit still on to the floor, kneeling or with their legs crossed, for given that 16 hours a day, with a good flicker of movement resulting in punishment.
The punishments ranged from hitting - using hands, sticks, or leather belts - to forcing them to run in circles around a yard up to at least one 1,000 times.
"If I or others moved (in the cell), the guards would order me or all of the cellmates to extend our hands through the cell bars and would step on them repeatedly with their boots," said former detainee Park Ji Cheol.
Yoon Young Cheol, another former detainee, added: "There, you are simply treated as if you are worth significantly less than an animal, and that is what you conclude becoming."
Some female interviewees testified to rampant sexual violence at the facilities.
Kim Sun Young, a former trader in her 50s who fled North Korea in 2015 said she have been raped by her interrogator at a detention center.
Another officer sexually assaulted her by touching her underneath her clothes while interrogating her, Kim added, but said she had been "powerless to resist".
The report called on Pyongyang to "end endemic torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in detention" and urged South Korea, the United States, and other UN member states to "publicly and privately pressure the North Korean government".
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may be the third generation of his family to rule the country, where state surveillance is widespread and dissent not tolerated.
The united states already stand accused by the UN of "systematic, widespread and gross" human rights violations that range between torture, extrajudicial killings to running prison camps.
Pyongyang maintains that it protects and promotes "genuine human rights", and says there is no justification for the West to try to set human rights standards for all of those other worlds.
It condemns international criticism on the issue as a smear campaign to undermine its "sacred socialist system".
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