Wednesday, August 6, 2008      East-Asia-Intel.com

A Seoul-based human rights organization has collected 6,738 cases of human rights violations in North Korea last year, up from 3,903 cases in 2006, reflecting the worsening humanitarian plight facing people in that Stalinist state.

Two armed Chinese police officers drag Lee Sun-hee from the Japanese Consulate in Beijing as two-year old Han-Mi Kim fell from her mother's back during the scramble in 2002. International Coalition for North Korean Human Rights

Of the 6,738 cases of human rights abuses, 1,006 resulted in executions, according to the non-governmental Database Center for North Korean Human Rights. A total of 901 were publicly killed and 59 others were summary executed, the group said its annual human rights white paper.

Of the abuse cases, some 56 percent involved crackdowns on liberties; 20 percent were violations of the right to live; and 10 percent involved abuses of the rights to movement and residence.

More than half of the violations occurred in the famine-hit Hamkyong Province bordering China, presumably resulting from Pyongyang's harsh crackdown on attempts to cross the border in search of food, the group said.

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However in 23.2 percent of political cases, the victims' fates were unknown.

Victims charged with cross border offenses were detained in most cases (58.3 percent) while 9 percent were resettled and 9.7 percent were killed.

The primary source for the data were interviews with North Korean defectors in South Korea and refugee-seekers in China.

The group said it could not rule out the possibility that some cases were counted more than once since the report was a compilation based on limited information.

"But the white paper is significant in that it is based on multifaceted and systematic surveys aimed at improving the human rights situation in North Korea," the report said.

"The purpose of the white paper is to provide objective, systematically researched and analyzed data on human rights violations in North Korea."

The research paper comes at a time when the South's conservative government has intensified its campaign to improve human rights conditions in North Korea.

A group of lawmakers from the ruling Grand National Party introduced a bill last week that would force Seoul to address the North’s human rights violations.

The bill calls for Seoul to make "all-out efforts to ensure North Korean people's right to live with dignity and improve their human rights record on the basis of freedom, democracy and humanitarianism."

Earlier in July, another group of lawmakers from the GNP and minor conservative parties introduced a bill on the South Korean "government's responsibility and duty to improve the human rights situation in North Korea."

Either of the bills is likely to get parliamentary approval, as the 299-member single-chamber legislature is dominated by the conservative ruling party with 172 seats.

The GNP had submitted a similar North Korea human rights bill in 2005 but it was rejected by the then-ruling liberal party, which was pushing for reconciliation with the communist neighbor.

In another move to tackle the human rights issue, the Seoul government named Jhe Seong-Ho, a law professor who has been a harsh critic of the North's human rights abuses, as the country's ambassador for human rights.