North Korea is going all out to discredit human rights abuse charges following a well-known defector’s recent confession of errors in his accounts about life in the communist country.
Last week, Shin Dong-hyuk, one of the most frequently cited survivors of brutal North Korean prison camps, admitted to some errors in the timeline and the location of his accounts of experience and defection from North Korea’s political prison camp.
Shin’s confession has challenged the credibility of a United Nations commission of inquiry report on North Korea human rights violations, which heavily drew on the case of Shin’s birth and sufferings at a prison camp in the North.
Shin admitted that he was raised at a lighter-security prison camp rather than at the most brutal one, where he was previously known to have been born and tortured.
This prompted North Korea to launch full-fledged efforts to discredit Shin and international human rights abuse charges.
In a statement issued by the association of human rights studies on Jan. 21, North Korea said the recent U.N. COI report is “sheer lies” because testimonies by North Korean defectors, including Shin, which the report is based on, cannot be trusted.
“So needless to say, all the ‘resolutions on the human rights’ forcibly adopted against the DPRK on the basis of such false documents are invalid,” the statement noted.
The statement was later followed by letters to the U.N. and its Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon by North Korean Ambassador to the U.N. Ja Song-nam, as well as So Se-pyong, ambassador to the North Korean mission to Geneva, which called for the suspension of human rights violation charges against North Korea.
The U.S. and COI Chairman Michael Kirby came to the defense of the human rights report earlier this week, saying that the report is sufficient enough as evidence of North Korea’s deplorable human rights situation.
Despite the defense, the North may muster further efforts to discredit testimonies of North Korean defectors, as well as human rights violation charges based on the testimonies, experts said.
“So far, the testimonies of North Korean defectors played the key role in formulating the image of North Korea to the outside world,” said Chang Yong-suk, a researcher at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University. “The country could attempt to capitalize on the recent episode of Shin in order to renew its negative image,” Chang noted.
The COI report, which accused North Korea of “systemic, widespread and gross human rights violations,” was the basis of the U.N.’s adoption of a human rights resolution late last year, calling for the referral of the human right situation to the International Criminal Court.
North Korea has vehemently resisted the COI report, saying it’s a U.S. plot to topple the regime. (Yonhap)
