Torture camps

North Korean prison camps are said to be something that only Stalin could have dreamed of. The outside world knows about them thanks to the handful of North Korean refugees who have escaped. These defectors tell stories of torture, forced abortion and public execution carried out as punishment for "crimes" like questioning the government, practicing Christianity or crossing into China in search of food.

A coalition of 40 human rights groups say these first hand accounts are what prompted them to petition the United Nations Tuesday to open an investigation into North Korea's prison system.

"The arch of history is clearly tending toward the realization of universal human rights. While freedom for North Koreans may not come tomorrow, it will come" Jack Rendler, North Korea specialist at Amnesty International and one of the petition's signatories.

The activists, calling themselves the Coalition To Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea, say that around 200,000 North Koreans currently languish inside these camps.

"What we want to have happen is that the UN - UN Human Rights Council - will establish a commission of inquiry to look into the violations that have occurred by virtue of there being a prison camp and labor camp system in North Korea and the abuses that occur within that system," Rendler said at the conference in Seoul.

Disloyalty punished

Their petition is based on the allegations made by North Korean refugees like Kang Chol-hwan, whose book "The Aquariums of Pyongyang" detailed his family's punishment inside a labor camp for suspicions of disloyalty toward the regime.

Kang, who was on hand for the coalition's press conference, says the North Korean government has taken revenge on his relatives since the publication of his memoir.

But even supporters of the petition say it's unlikely to get very far. Getting the UN to take binding action against a member nation on humanitarian grounds has proven near to impossible, says Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division. He says that similar cases brought before the UN, such as the crackdown in Syria, hit a dead end because of some nations that strongly oppose outside intervention into what they see as domestic issues. And he expects to see the same nations obstruct any efforts to confront North Korea.

"Russia and China working together to try to stymie any effort supported by a few other countries, and much of Asia trying to ignore the issue and probably not even showing up for the vote," Robertson said.

'Continued opposition'

Resolutions on North Korean human rights have been brought out of the UNHRC chambers and put in front of the Security Council twice before. And both times Russia and China, who wield permanent veto power, struck them down.

"We will face continued opposition and a very difficult time taking it beyond the human rights council and the ability to lay out the case against the government in North Korea. That may be enough," Robertson says.

And even if the petition does lead to a resolution from the UNHRC, it is unlikely to make North Korea budge. Pyongyang has repeatedly denied visitation requests from the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights. And the petition's demand to send investigators to six gulag-like camps as well as call on the regime to compensate its victims will almost certainly fall on deaf ears in Pyongyang.

But faced with those obstacles, the coalition seems undeterred. They point to Chile, South Africa and the Soviet Union as past examples of how pressure from the outside really can make change.

"We will change the situation in North Korea much the same way," Render of Amnesty International says. "With North Korea you have to keep trying everything, pursue every avenue because it is such an intractable problem."

Author: Jason Strother
Editor: Sarah Berning