This article focuses on listing fact-finding reports, which distinguish themselves from other publications such as pamphlets, news articles, books, or journal articles, in that they are meant to aggregate information from multiple sources and provide a balanced, overall view of the topic covered for the non-commercial purpose of informing the general public and policy makers. These reports tend to rely more on the credibility of their publishing institutions than on their individual authors. Fact-finding reports are also distinct from policy briefs as the latter ground their analysis and recommendations on the facts laid out in the former. The inclusion is based on the notability (and not the concurrence to any particular view) of the publishing institutions to the inquiry and deliberations on the situation in North Korea.
This list lays out the evolution of the reporting efforts, with a first wave of reports by human rights NGOs just describing the general characteristics of the regime, followed by another wave of civil society and governmental reports with some more details, then prompting the United Nations to also exercise greater scrutiny and pursue its own investigations.[3]
The vast majority of reports (except those published by the DPRK itself, also included in this article) point to a very grave situation, with human rights systematically violated by the North Korean government.
Efforts to continue to investigate and document the situation of human rights in the DPRK are on-going, given that there are no indications of substantial improvements in the regime's policies, and despite the continued isolation of the regime that limits outside investigators' access to the country and to its general population.[4]
At the end of WWII, with Japan stripped of its colonial territories, the Korean peninsula became a United Nations trusteeship, with the northern half administered by the Soviet Union, and the southern half administered by the United States.[vi][vii][viii] The ultimate stated plan was to allow Korea as a whole to become again a united and independent country.[ix][x] Disagreements among the parties on how and when to implement the united self-rule led to the two territories establishing their own separate and rival governments.[xi][xii][xiii][xiv] The Korean War (1950-1953) was the last attempt to reunify the peninsula by force, but it ended in stalemate and it entrenched two very different regimes.[xv][xvi][xvii]
Propped by their allies, North and South experienced rapid economic growth after the Korean War, but in the 1970s the North's growth faltered[xx] while the South's accelerated.[xxi]
While South Korea had a period of military autocracy, mass mobilizations of its citizens forced its end in 1987. This led to the modern South Korea being a young, more stable democracy with a prosperous free market economy.[xxi][xix] Meanwhile, North Korea's totalitarian regime kept a stronger grip on its society, which was never able to mobilize to demand reforms. Its command economy stagnated in the 1970s, and after the disintegration of the Soviet Union it spiralled into crisis in the 1990s, leading to a massive famine. North Korea remains to this day as one of the most isolated countries in the world, with a struggling economy, within an isolationist, militaristic, and totalitarian regime.[xix]
The reporting of human rights in the DPRK follows the progression of the modern movement of human rights, which from the 1970s civil society and governmental efforts made violations more visible to the general public and in international politics.[5][6][7]
Given the opacity of the DPRK's regime, especially before the 1990s, little was known about the situation of human rights.[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] The few reports that were issued at that time made note of the lack of concrete information, mostly only being able to describe the general characteristics of the country's political system.[11][8][15]Amnesty International, founded in 1961,[16] began to issue some basic reports on the DPRK in 1977.[17][9] In 1979 the US's Department of State also began to cover the DPRK in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.[18]
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent North Korean famine of the 1990s, a higher number of individuals began to flee the country, and more first-person accounts began to be collected by human rights organizations.[3] That was also followed in the early 2000s by greater availability of satellite imagery.[10] South Korea, having itself transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy in the late 1980s, began to publish reports in 1996 through its governmental think tank Korea Institute for National Unification.[19][20] In the late 1990s and 2000s several NGOs specialized on North Korea emerged and began to publish their own research: Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (1996),[2][21]Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (2001),[22][23][24][3] Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (2003),[25][26][27] People for Successful Corean Reunification (2006).[28][29][30][31] Around the same time some other world-wide human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Christian Solidarity Worldwide also began to publish reports on the DPRK.
As reports from NGOs and governments began to reveal more details on the human rights situation in the DPRK during the 1990s and 2000s, these concerns were elevated to the United Nations, where various UN bodies and parties also began to express a growing concern on the situation and opacity of the regime.[32][33][34][35][3] The mounting evidence being collected and published by governments and civil society led in 2004 to the establishment of the mandate for the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK, issuing reports annually.[36]
Ten years later, further joint efforts by the UN Special Rapporteur, governments, and NGOs[2] led to the establishment of a special one-time investigation unprecedented in depth and breadth[42] commissioned by the Human Rights Council, with a landmark report published in 2014.[43][44][33][45][3] It was deemed the most authoritative report up to that point.[46][44][47] The report unequivocally concluded that the DPRK regime committed gross and systematic violations of human rights including freedom of thought, expression and religion; freedom from discrimination; freedom of movement and residence; and the right to food,[45] as well as crimes against humanity entailing "extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation".[33][48][49]
The UN's fact-finding process continues to yield periodical reports, which greatly rely on and are underpinned by the also on-going research and publishing conducted by NGOs and governmental agencies.[35][50][51][2][42][4][7]
Increased awareness of human rights abuses has led to efforts in shaping policy and pressuring the North Korean regime.[1] However the pursuit for the improvement of human rights in the DPRK has had to contend with the efforts of preventing a nuclear weapons escalation.[1][42] Further, the isolationist and totalitarian nature of the regime has also meant that information and freedom of movement of its population as well as that of foreigners is still tightly controlled, making extremely challenging to document abuses on the ground,[4] including having access to imagery (other than satellite imagery) that could inspire greater action.[42]
The United Nations has issued four main kinds of reports on the human rights of North Korea.
The first are a series of documents intended to be recommendations from Treaty-based bodies, which are issued by those bodies to each country that is party to it (in contrast to charter-based bodies, which all UN members are part of). These treaty-based bodies that North Korea has decided to be a party to include the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Committee on the Rights of the Child, and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The first document of this kind was issued in 1998 (Convention on the Rights of the Child); the second was in 2001 (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), after a 17-year delay in North Korea submitting the required information to the committee.[52][53]
Prompted by growing evidence provided by human rights NGOs, during the 1990s and 2000s various UN bodies and parties expressed greater concern on the situation of human rights in North Korea and the opacity of the country's government.[32][33][34][35][7] That led to another series of reports that were started by the UN Commission on Human Rights (the predecessor of the UN Human Rights Council), which established the mandate for the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK in 2004, issuing reports annually.[54][55] They are issued in detail to the Human Rights Council, and in a more condensed form to the General Assembly.
The United Nations also conducts a Universal Periodic Review (every 3 or 4 years, in which all UN members are subject to a review on their human rights practices), with the first report on North Korea issued in 2010.[56][57][58][59]
The Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU; formerly the Research Institute for National Unification) opened the Center for North Korean Human Rights in 1994 to collect and manage systematically all source materials and objective data concerning North Korean human rights; and from 1996, KINU has been publishing every year the ‘White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea’ in Korean and in English.[19][69][70][71] Other reports, including reports by the U.S. government, use South Korea KINU's reports as part of their sources. Another South Korean governmental institution publishing research on human rights in the DPRK is the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK).[72]
Annual general reports (Korea Institute for National Unification)[edit]
The Country Reports on Human Rights Practices issued by the DOS noted every year the difficulty of having detailed an up-to-date information, and instead relying on sparse information collected over several years. This was especially the case in the during the 1970s and 80s, and began to change in the 1990s with more witness accounts, while continuing to note a lack of more detailed and more timely information.[12] As more reports became available, the DOS and USCRIF reports have frequently cited reports from the United Nations, South Korea's Korea Institute for National Unification (starting in 1996), nonprofits (especially the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and Data Center for North Korean Human Rights, since their establishment in the 2000s), and from the press.[50]
Human rights organizations specialized on North Korea (based in South Korea)[edit]
Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights[edit]
The Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (NKHR; South Korea-based nonprofit founded in 1996) works in researching and disseminating information about the human rights violations in North Korea. It also runs assistance programs for North Korean defectors.[2][77][21]
Database Center for North Korean Human Rights[edit]
The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB; South Korea-based nonprofit founded in 2003)[25][26][27] specializes in collecting and analyzing and maintaining a database of human rights abuses, which as of 2017 included the accounts of over 40,000 individuals and 60,000 cases of human rights violations.[78]
Political Prison Camps in North Korea Today (Report). Jul 20, 2011.
North Korean Defectors in China – Forced Repatriation and Human Rights Violations (Report). Jan 28, 2014.
North Korean Human Rights Case Report: Victims' Voices Vol. 1, Vol. 2 (Report). Oct 10, 2013.
An Evaluation Report of the North Korean Human Rights Situation after the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry Report -Based on an Analysis of NKDB's Database- (Report). Mar 2016.
North Korean Political Prison Camps: A Catalogue of Political Prison Camp Staff, Detainees, and Victims of Enforced Disappearance (Report). Aug 2016.
Conditions of Labor and Human Rights: North Korean Overseas Laborers in Russia (Report). Dec 2016.
The UN Universal Periodic Review and the DPRK: Monitoring of North Korea's Implementation of Its Recommendations (Report). Jul 2017.
Human rights organizations specialized on North Korea (based outside South Korea)[edit]
Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (U.S.-based)[edit]
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK; U.S.-based non-profit established in 2001) is known for its original research based on its adept[22][23][24][1] use of satellite imagery, defector accounts,[3] and even information coming directly from inside the country.[35][22] Its published research has been relied upon as sources in reports issued by the United Nations and governments.[35][50][51][3] HRNK has issued three types of reports: reports analyzing the situation on prison camps,[1] reports on other human rights issues in the country, and reports on North Korea's leadership and institutions, as well as policy briefings addressed at the international community. The first two types of reports are listed here.
Amnesty International (AI; based in the United Kingdom, established in 1961) annual report The state of the world's human rights[17][42] initially included a brief mention of most countries, growing in later years to devoting 1-2 pages to the analysis of the situation of human rights in each country, including North Korea in 1977.[17][9][1] Through the 1970s, 1980s the organization noted that its ability to report on human rights in the country was severely hampered by the opacity of the regime, and only being able to recount some scant reports.[9][8] This began to change in the 1990s when some more information became available. Also since that point AI has also issued other stand-alone reports specific to human rights issues in North Korea.
Human Rights Watch publishes annually a World Report. Below are listed the sections of those annual reports that focus on the situation in North Korea. HRW has produced world reports since 1989 covering a limited number of countries, and it began to devote a section to the DPRK in 2004.[79][80][1][42]
^ abcdefgGoedde, Patricia (August 2010). "Legal Mobilization for Human Rights Protection in North Korea: Furthering Discourse or Discord?". Human Rights Quarterly. 32 (3): 530–574. doi:10.1353/hrq.2010.0008. JSTOR40784055. S2CID143332430. International human rights networks have publicized the exigencies of human rights violations in North Korea and have mobilized international and domestic laws as part of their respective movements to pressure North Korea on human rights
^ abcTomás Ojea Quintana (UN Special Rapporteur) (18 September 2017). Situation of human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Doc ID A/72/394) (Report). UN General Assembly. Archived from the original on 4 September 2018. Retrieved 17 October 2019. The human rights situation in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has been subject to close international scrutiny for several years. Although restrictions on access for independent human rights monitors have made it challenging to collect up-to-date information, patterns of serious violations continue to be documented by various external sources.
^ abcAmnesty International (1985). The state of the world's human rights 1985 (Report). United Kingdom. p. 221. Amnesty International's work on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), North Korea, was seriously hampered by the fact that the authorities rarely divulge any information about arrests, trials or death sentences.
^ abcd1977 Amnesty International Report(PDF) (Report). Amnesty International. Archived(PDF) from the original on 2018-08-25. Amnesty International has carefully monitored all available information from North Korea and can only report that it contains no detailed evidence whatsoever regarding arrests, trials and imprisonment in that country. Furthermore, there appears to be a complete censorship of news relating to human rights violations. Despite its efforts Amnesty International has not been able to trace any information, even positive, on the subject of such rights in North Korea.
^ abCohen, Roberta (November 28, 2012). "Challenges to Human Rights Information Gathering in North Korea". USA: Brookings Institution. Archived from the original on 2018-03-17. Retrieved February 2, 2018. This certainly contrasts with the past when the world was largely in the dark about human rights conditions in North Korea. It was not until 40 years after Kim Il-sung assumed power — in the late 1970s and 80s — that international NGOs first began to report on the human rights situation. More recently with the escape of some 25,000 North Koreans to the South, information has become more plentiful about all aspects of human rights in North Korea. Hundreds of former prisoners and former prison guards are among the defectors and have been providing testimony about their prison experiences. And since 2003, satellite photos of the camps have helped verify the information provided by the former prisoners and guards. North Koreans hiding in China have also been providing information.
^ ab1980 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (Report). February 2, 1981. pp. 631–638. There was little new information in 1980 on human rights practices in North Korea. Few, if any, significant changes are known to have taken place. Much of this report necessarily is based therefore on information obtained over a period of time. While limited in scope and detail, the information is generally indicative of the human rights situation in North Korea.
^ ab1988 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (Report). February 1989. pp. 834–841. The united States has no diplomatic relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). North Korea forbids representatives of governments that do have relations with it, as well as journalists and other invited visitors, the freedom of movement that would enable them to assess effectively human rights conditions there. Most of this report, therefore, is a repeat of previous human rights reports based on information obtained over a period of time extending from well before 1988. While limited in scope and detail, the information is indicative of the human rights situation in North Korea today.
^William E. Skillend (Chapter on Korea) (1972). Macadam, Ivison; Grindrod, Muriel; Boas, Ann (eds.). The Annual Register 1971. 213. Great Britain: Longmans, Green and Co Ltd. p. 309. ISBN0-582-11971-5. [in 1971] News from North Korea continued to be confined to reports of delegations from abroad and meetings of citizens registering praise of Kim Il-song. (...) Comments on the whole Korean situation and on world affairs supported supported reports from visitors to North Korea that the personality of cult had reached a pitch of hysteria
^William E. Skillend (Chapter on Korea) (1977). Hodson, H. V.; Rose, Bishakha (eds.). The Annual Register 1976. 218. Great Britain: Longmans, Green and Co Ltd. p. 304. ISBN0-582-50113-X. The difficulty in interpreting the situation on the Korean peninsula stememed, as in previous years, from the almost total absence of reliable information from North Korea.
^ abDay, Alan J.; Hoffman, Verena, eds. (1989). The Annual Register 1988. 230. Great Britain: Longmans Group Limited. p. 359. ISBN0-582-03829-4. The world's most closed society and the most orthodox present-day practitioner of Stalinism, North Korea had also become an economic failure. Only 30 years earlier it had been richer than then south. (...) Politically the country appeared as ossified as ever. Kim Il Sung, the world's longest-ruling dictator and hailed as the Great Leader, continued to preside over the country, as he had since 1946.
^Childs, Peter; Storry, Mike, eds. (2002). "Amnesty International". Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture. London: Routledge. pp. 22–23.
^ abGeliu, Peter (Spring 2008). "Reviewed Work: White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea by Korea Institute for National Unification". North Korean Review. 4 (1): 138–140. JSTOR43908700.
^ abChubb, Danielle L. (2014). "A new era of inter-Korean relations, 1998-2007". Contentious Activism and Inter-Korean Relations. Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/chub16136. hdl:1885/151124. ISBN978-0231161367. JSTOR10.7312/chub16136. The Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (NKHR), the first South Korean NGO to form solely on the issue of North Korean human rights, rejected any ideological labels, striving to influence policy debate in a positive and neutral manner. (...) Reverend Benjamin Yoon, along with a number of other human rights activists, intellectuals, and North Korean defectors, founded the Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights in May 1996. (...) NKHR positions itself as a "nonprofit, nongovernmental, nonreligious human rights organization." 57 Yoon, himself the former director of the national Korean Section of Amnesty International (1972–1985), envisioned that this North Korean human rights NGO would adopt a similar style of advocacy to that of Amnesty International (AI).
^ abcdefHilpert, Hanns Günther; Krumbein, Frédéric (Spring 2016). "Human Rights in North Korea: A European Perspective". The Journal of East Asian Affairs. 30 (1). South Korea: Institute for National Security Strategy: 67–92. JSTOR43829410.
^United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political RightsDocument- CONSIDERATION OF REPORTS SUBMITTED BY STATES PARTIES UNDER ARTICLE 40 OF THE COVENANT Concluding observations of the Human Rights Committee DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA CCPR/CO/72/PRK 27 Aug 2001. "The Committee welcomes the submission of the second periodic report, which contains detailed information on domestic legislation in the area of civil and political rights, and the opportunity to resume the dialogue with the State party after an interval of more than 17 years. The Committee welcomes the State party's decision to send a strong delegation from its capital, composed of representatives of various government authorities, for the examination of the second periodic report, and the readiness expressed by the delegation to continue the dialogue with the Committee after the examination of the report. The Committee is also pleased to note that the delegation of the State party recognized the importance of the Committee's task and intimated that the Committee could expect more prompt reporting in the future. The Committee regrets, however, the considerable delay in the submission of the report, which was due in 1987. It regrets the lack of information on the human rights situation in practice, as well as the absence of facts and data on the implementation of the Covenant. As a result, a number of credible and substantiated allegations of violations of Covenant provisions which have been brought to the attention of the Committee could not be addressed effectively and the Committee found it difficult to determine whether individuals in the State party's territory and subject to its jurisdiction fully and effectively enjoy their fundamental rights under the Covenant."
^DPRK Association for Human Rights Studies (September 13, 2014). Report of the DPRK Association for Human Rights Studies(PDF) (Report). Korean Central News Agency (republished by The National Committee on North Korea). Archived from the original(PDF) on August 21, 2015. Retrieved Aug 20, 2015.
^Suh, Bo-hyuk (2007). "Controversies over North Korean human rights in South korean society". Asian Perspective. 31 (2). Lynne Rienner Publishers: 23–46. doi:10.1353/apr.2007.0022. JSTOR42704588.
^KUDLÁČOVÁ, Lenka (2014). "South Korean Civil Society Organizations as Confidence-Builders? The Experience with South Korean Civil Society Groupings in the Republic of Korea and the DPRK". Perspectives. 22 (2). Institute of International Relations, NGO: 33–64. JSTOR24625252.