Poor North Korea young Defectors! Who can save their miserable souls?

9 North Korean Defectors Sent Home From Laos Via China, South Korean Report Says

SEOUL, South Korea — Nine North Korean defectors have been forced to return to their country from China after being captured in Laos, a South Korean news report says.

Laos had been assumed to be a safe route for North Koreans leaving their mostly poverty-stricken homeland. Activists say that defectors who are returned to North Korea can be punished or even killed by the regime, considered one of the world's most repressive and brutal.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said the defectors were flown home Tuesday despite a request from South Korea that China not repatriate them. The report cited an anonymous foreign ministry official in Seoul, who also expressed strong regret over the Chinese decision. The foreign ministry declined to confirm the report.

 

The report said the defectors, aged between 15 and 23, fled to Laos through China last month and were caught by Laotian authorities earlier this month. Laos sent the defectors to China on Monday, weeks after a Laotian delegation visited the North Korean capital.


In a statement, the U.S. State Department said it was concerned about reports and urged "all countries in the region to cooperate in the protection of North Korean refugees within their territories."

Close to 25,000 North Koreans have left their country since the Korean War, most of them over the last 10 years.

Often with the help of Christian missionary groups and having paid thousands of dollars to people smugglers, they have traditionally travelled first to China and then onward through Southeast Asian countries to Thailand, where they can fly to South Korea with the help of the government in Seoul. Defections across the land border between the Koreas are very rare.


China, North Korea's foremost ally, does not recognize North Korean defectors as asylum seekers and can return them.


"It's tragic and disappointing," Kim Eun-young, an activist with the Seoul-based Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, said Thursday of the reported repatriation. "We fear defectors will now feel more intimidated about trying to come to South Korea through Laos or other Southeast Asian countries."

U.N. concerned about North Korean defectors in China

A North Korean flag on a tower flutters in the wind at a North Korean village near the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in this picture taken just south of the border, in Paju, north of Seoul, February 15, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Lee Jae-Won

GENEVA

GENEVA (Reuters) - A United Nations human rights investigator and the U.N. refugee agency voiced concern on Thursday about the fate of nine North Korean defectors, some of them children, who were sent back to China this week from Laos after trying to cross the border.



Chinese authorities are obliged under international law not to return them to North Korea, where they could face persecution and possibly death, Marzuki Darusman, U.N. special rapporteur on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), said.



"I have very real concerns about the penalties and treatment they could face if returned to DPRK and all the concerned authorities have an urgent responsibility to ensure their protection," Darusman said in a statement issued in Geneva.



He said no one should be forced to return to North Korea where, he said, "they may face persecution or severe punishment, including torture and the death penalty".



Antonio Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, voiced grave concern over the safety of the deportees, whose asylum claims he said had not been assessed.



In a separate statement he said his agency was seeking information about their whereabouts. All states had a duty to refrain from measures that could lead to returning a person to a country where his or her life or freedom would be threatened.



The nine youths, all believed to be orphans, were sent back to China on May 27 after being arrested by Laotian police, Darusman said. Guterres said that they were arrested on May 10 in Laos and that five of the nine were children.



"I am extremely disappointed that the Laos Government appears to have abdicated its protection responsibilities in this way, and I urge the Chinese authorities not to do the same," he said.



North Korean authorities consider it a criminal offence to leave the country without official permission, according to Darusman's latest report.



Darusman, a former attorney-general of Indonesia, is part of a commission of inquiry launched in March to investigate violations and possible crimes against humanity in North Korea.



The three-member commission is expected to focus on allegations of torture and use by North Korea of labor camps believed to hold some 200,000 people, activists say. Pyongyang denies the existence of such camps and is not expected to cooperate.



The U.N. General Assembly has expressed serious concern about the situation of refugees returned to North Korea and the punishments they can face.