A United Nations Commission of Inquiry has found that crimes against humanity have been committed in North Korea and recommends that its findings be referred to the International Criminal Court, two people familiar with the commission’s report have told The Associated Press.
The report, to be released Monday, is the most authoritative account yet of rights violations by North Korean authorities.
The commission, which conducted a year-long investigation, has found evidence of an array of crimes, including “extermination,” crimes against humanity against starving populations and a widespread campaign of abductions of individuals in South Korea and Japan.
Its report does not examine in detail individual responsibility for crimes but recommends steps toward accountability. It also could build international pressure on North Korea, whose rights record has drawn less censure at the U.N. than its nuclear and missile programs have.
An outline of the report’s conclusions was provided to the AP by an individual familiar with its contents who was not authorized to divulge the information before its formal release and who spoke on condition of anonymity. A U.S. official, speaking anonymously for the same reason, confirmed the main conclusions.
The three-member commission, led by retired Australian judge Michael Kirby, was set up by the U.N.’s top human-rights body last March in the most serious international attempt yet to investigate evidence of rights violations in the reclusive, authoritarian state, which is notorious for its political prisons camps, repression and famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1990s.
The report concludes that the testimony and other information it received “create reasonable grounds … to merit a criminal investigation by a competent national or international organ of justice.”
A spokesman for North Korea’s U.N. Mission in New York who refused to give his name told the AP: “We totally reject the unfounded findings of the Commission of Inquiry regarding crimes against humanity. We will never accept that.”
The commission, which conducted public hearings with more than 80 victims and other witnesses in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington but was not allowed into North Korea, recommends that the U.N. Security Council refer its findings to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.
There are several procedural hurdles to the commission’s report even being referred to the council, and ultimately, permanent council members that have veto power, such as China, are unlikely to support any referral.
Another obstacle is that the court’s jurisdiction does not extend to crimes committed before July 2002, when its statute went into force.
But the commission leaves open other avenues for action.
It recommends that the U.N. General Assembly and the Human Rights Council should extend the mandate of special monitoring of North Korea, and it proposes the Geneva-based council establish a structure to help ensure accountability, in particular regarding crimes against humanity, that would build on evidence and documentation the commission has compiled.
The commission will formally present its findings to the rights council March 17, and the 48-member body will likely consider which of the report’s recommendations it wants to support.
Last October, Kirby told the General Assembly that when the commission delivers its final report, “the international community will be obliged to face its responsibilities and decide what concrete action it will take” to protect the North Korean people.
Testimony by North Korean defectors at last year’s hearings produced accounts of systematic rape, murder, torture and suffering during the famine of the late 1990s. The commission said it plans to release on Monday, along with the report, a 372-page document with excerpts of witness testimony.
The commission also heard from experts about North Korea’s network of camps, estimated to hold 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners, and about access to food in the country. It examined the causes of the 1990s famine and to what extent it was due to natural disasters - as the authoritarian regime of then-leader Kim Jong Il claimed - or to mismanagement.
The report identifies crimes against humanity committed through “decisions and policies taken for the purposes of sustaining the present political system, in full awareness that such decisions would exacerbate starvation and related deaths amongst much of the population.”
The other two members of the commission are Sonja Biserko, a Serbian human-rights expert, and Marzuki Darusman, a senior Indonesian jurist who has also served as the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea since 2010.
Information for this article was contributed by Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/15/2014