[ad_1]
SEOUL: Torture, humiliation, and forced confessions are rampant in North Korea’s pretrial detention system that treats people like “less than an animal,” a human rights group said Monday (Oct 19) in a report on the country’s opaque legal processes.
US-based Human Rights Watch relied on interviews with dozens of former detainees and North Korean officials to highlight what it called inhumane conditions in detention centers that often amounted 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 known about its criminal justice system.
The mistreatment of detainees – hitting with a stick or kicking – was “especially harsh” in the early stages of pretrial detention, interviewees said.
READ: UN rights official urges easing North Korean sanctions for COVID-19 strain
“The regulations say there should be no beatings, but we need confessions during the investigation and the early stages of the preliminary examination,” said a former police officer.
“So you have to beat them to get the confession.”
The former detainees said they were forced to sit on the ground, on their knees or cross-legged, for up to 16 hours a day, including with a flash of movement leading to punishment.
Punishments ranged from hitting (with hands, sticks or leather belts) to forcing them to run in circles around one meter up to 1,000 times.
“If I or others moved (in the cell), the guards ordered me or all the cellmates to extend our hands through the bars of the cell and repeatedly trample them with our boots,” said the former detainee Park Ji Cheol.
Yoon Young Cheol, another former detainee, added, “There, they treat you like you’re worth less than an animal, and that’s what you end up becoming.”
Some interviewees testified about rampant sexual violence at the facility.
Kim Sun Young, a former commercial in her 50s who fled North Korea in 2015, said her interrogator had raped her in a detention center.
Another police officer sexually assaulted her by touching her under her clothes while questioning 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 during detention” and urged South Korea, the United States and other UN member states to “publicly and privately pressure the government of North Korea”.
LEE: ‘I have failed’: Kim Jong Un shows his tearful side when facing North Korea’s difficulties
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is the third generation of his family to rule the country, where state surveillance is widespread and dissent is not tolerated.
The country is already accused by the UN of “systematic, widespread and flagrant” human rights violations that range from torture and extrajudicial executions to the operation of 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 the rest of the world.
He condemns international criticism on the issue as a smear campaign to undermine his “sacred socialist system”.
