Which Human Rights are Violated in North Korea?
North Korea is violating every single human right on the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By capturing and torturing North Koreans to stay in the harsh prison camps, they are violating the following articles:
Article 4: No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
- In the labor camps, prisoners are forced to work long days. They are not being paid and given little to no food to eat. Guards in the prison camp sexually abuse the women in the camps.
Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
- In the prison camps, there are daily executions and tortures. The guards treat the prisoners inhumanely. During interrogations, prisoners experience electric shock, water torture, severe beatings, forced abortions, hanging, and more.
Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
- In the prison camps, people are forced to stay. If they try to leave, they are tortured or killed immediately.
Article 14: 1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
- The Chinese have The Status of Refugees, the 1967 Protocol, and the 1951 Convention that they live by. Whenever a North Korean prisoner escapes to China, the Chinese catch them and immediately send them back to North Korea. There, the prisoner faces even more imprisonment and torture. The Chinese send back about 25,000 people a year.
Article 15: Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
- When a women expressed the desire to live in another country and expose the secrets of North Korea, she was killed by a firing squad. People are imprisoned for at least five years for wanting to live in another country.
Article 18. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
- According to North Korean refugees, anyone who has their own religion or ideas different from the government are sent to prison camps. People who practice their religion underground are also executed and tortured. Many Christians live in the prison camps under extremely harsh conditions.
Article 28. Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
- Citizens have no say in their government. The prisons North Korean's are sent to are extremely harsh and millions of people have died there. Usually, babies are killed when they are born or pregnant women experience a forced abortion.
"Citizens were denied freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association, and the government attempted to control all information. The government restricted freedom of religion, citizens' movement, and worker rights."- 2008 Human Rights Report: DPRK; US State Department, February 25, 2009
(North Korea Freedom Coalition)