Dying for rights: putting North Korea's human rights abuses on the record

Abstract

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) may have the worst human right record in the world. Imagine a country where you can be sentenced to a long prison term for singing a foreign song, possessing a bible, or complaining about a dire state-induced famine—and this only skims the surface. Perhaps due to preoccupation with the nuclear issue and the inability to get good data, there are few comprehensive works on rights in this benighted country. That is where Sandra Fahy's masterful catalogue of North Korea's rights abuses comes in. She believes that North Koreans ‘endlessly’ suffer a winter bereft of ordinary rights (p. 261). Her book details various types of violations: the well-known detentions without due process, torture, summary executions and the most horrible prison camps in the communist world, on top of denial of rights to movement, religious practice, food and freedom from discrimination. The famine of the 1990s was one of the worst man-made disasters of the twentieth century. It did not directly threaten the regime, but it changed the country's rights environment. The right to food is widely accepted internationally, and famine is often blamed on overpopulation and geographic or climate issues. Actually, famine in most countries results from lack of access to food, especially if it is poorly allocated due to power relations within a society, or ‘deliberate acts of commission’ (p. 47). Because famines only gradually develop, people usually do not see a clear link to the government and often do not blame officials. The North Korean official narrative that all people were joined not in famine, but in an ‘arduous march’, made it easy to blame foreign pressure on the country. The problem for the DPRK was that the famine caused ordinary people to violate laws in order to survive. Most notably, they had to seek resources from China, South Korea and beyond. The regime's failure to take action for food security meant that famine-like conditions have since reccured every few years.