Decoding the Human Rights Situation in North Korea

North Korea is an anomaly in every sense of the word. Adjectives used for the notoriously dictatorial dynasty have ranged far and wide, curiously failing to completely encapsulate the political nature of the country. Every now and again, the actions of the leaders of the regime pop up in the news, often in inexplicable and baffling contexts.

Illustration by The Geostrata

This can range from the purchase of exorbitantly luxurious goods for the wealthy, to the test-launching of ballistic missiles as a classic sabre-rattling measure. Decoding the human rights situation in North Korea reveals the deeper, darker aspects of its governance and the severe impact on its citizens.

While testimonies coming out of North Korea about the domestic state of events remain scarce, the ones that do make it to the fore paint a grim picture of the lives of its inhabitants. The question then remains: what lies beneath the carefully concealed façade of the socio-economic conditions of its citizens? And how precisely does the regime ensure continuity of its dominion using a range of nefarious, legibility-based, centralised strategies? 

The most prominent means of regime brutalization is the system of political detention camps present in the country. While it is not at all uncommon for authoritarian regimes to flirt with the concept of strict penal punishments for dissenters in the form of imprisonment, North Korea’s system runs much deeper.

For instance, the practice of guilt by association, under which the relatives of defectors (to South Korea or China) are held in prisons, regardless of whether or not they had any knowledge or complicity in the defection process.

The 200,000+ people who are stashed away in the unbecoming camps, often for seemingly inconsequential crimes, are subjected to physical torture, mental abuse, and widespread forced labour. They are also denied access to basic nutritional food over prolonged periods of time. 

Food has forever been a driving force behind politics, having spurred some of the most famous revolutions and war-related decisions in history. Yet food can also be a tool in the hands of the government, a form of leverage, or, in the most radical scenarios, a means of population control and punishment.

This form of penal starvation has been tagged as "faminogenesis",  or a lack of food as a result of deliberate state-induced actions. The reasons for this are widespread, but primarily are meant to create a de facto dependance on the state.

This generally creates a rather tumultuous cascading effect. This is a clear violation of the general right to food outlined by the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESR), to which North Korea is a party. 

One justification used is that North Korea wants to create some semblance of national food security through self-sufficiency in terms of grain production. And to a degree, they did achieve this, with most of the consumed food grains being grown within the country itself.

However, this used to necessitate the substantial import of various agricultural inputs during previous years, since sparse domestic factors make it difficult to locally produce chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Thus, there remained a certain cognizance that not every part of the food production process could be handled internally. 

This changed drastically when COVID struck, as Kim Jong-Un opted to follow a strict closed border policy, one with a shoot-on-sight policy for anyone trying to escape into China. This involved clamping down on various trade routes between the DPRK and China.

The number of people defecting annually to China dropped from around 1000 in previous years to a mere 67 by 2022.

While the state provided the reasoning that these measures were set in place to mitigate the unchecked spread of COVID-19 in the country, alternative explanations also persist. Primary among these is the belief that shutting borders was a means of preventing information from spreading, particularly about COVID.

On one hand, a less informed population would cause relatively less paranoia and headaches, thereby making information control a key tool for authoritarian regimes. While on the other hand, preventing word of a dire health crisis in the country from spreading abroad would allow DPRK to maintain the staunchly resilient image they attempted to propagate. The dubious claims of having no COVID cases served this end.  

Predictably, this situation did not pan out particularly well. In the absence of even the bare necessities, food shortages became rampant as the economy floundered in its bid to be self-sufficient. People turned to smuggle goods in from China, with a black market emerging for basic food items at steep prices.

Data demonstrates that, from a health perspective, North Koreans were on average shorter and nutritionally worse off than their South Korean counterparts. The Food and Agricultural Organisation reported that a whopping 13 million people (a majority of the population) suffered from some degree of malnutrition. 

In the absence of any international supervision, monitoring, or regulation in the country, things do not look likely to take a turn for the better in the historically authoritarian communist system.

A long-standing practice of educational propaganda that entrenches the idolization of leaders in the minds of children has also led to very little being questioned within the country. All in all, the international community must continue to seek essential ways of dealing with the critical human rights situation that has remained woefully pervasive in

the country. 

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BY DHRUV BANERJEE

TEAM GEOSTRATA

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