North Korea more isolated than ever, says head of UN human rights office in Seoul

North Korea is building factories and hospitals, rolling out smartphones and mobile banking and passing new laws at an unprecedented rate, yet its people are more cut off from the outside world than at any point in the country’s history, according to James Heenan, head of the UN human rights office (OHCHR) in Seoul. He spoke to UN News in an interview published on 31 October.

Monitoring from outside

Heenan said his team has no direct access to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) because “almost no one” can get in, so it monitors from abroad. It prioritises testimony from people who suffered or witnessed violations, or whose relatives did, and has interviewed about a thousand people. It also draws on the growing volume of information published by the North Korean government, and on satellite imagery.

The international humanitarian community, including the UN, has not had access for five or six years, he said, so people have no outside help when disasters strike and lack some medicines and types of food. He described ordinary citizens as having no access to the internet and little knowledge of events outside, or even inside, the country.

Hunger, surveillance and forced labour

Life, Heenan said, depends heavily on a person’s status in the official “Songbun” class system, but for everyone there is intense surveillance at home, at work and at school, including the risk of government inspection groups arriving at any hour to check electronic equipment for forbidden content. He said every person his office has spoken to has talked about hunger at some point. Harvests have been “okay” after a drought earlier this year, he said, but an unreformed production and distribution system can still produce widespread nutritional problems.

Forced labour, he said, touches everyone, through “shock brigades” that supply unpaid labour for public works for days, months or even years, and through schoolchildren sent to the fields at harvest time. According to Heenan, during the COVID period his office saw people starve to death, though not on the scale of the 1990s.

Development drive, with caveats

Heenan pointed to flagship government programmes such as the “20 by 10” project, which aims to build factories in 20 counties every year for 10 years, and a large amount of hospital construction. Anecdotal evidence suggests more paid jobs, he said, but the UN cannot assess the real impact without access, and historical evidence suggests such large infrastructure projects can involve forced labour.

His biggest concern, he said, is the restriction on free movement. Even illegal crossings into China, once a pressure valve that let people earn money and return, have all but stopped. His second concern is the many families separated between the DPRK and South Korea, and to some extent Japan, as a result of past enforced disappearances by the DPRK. The survivors are elderly, he said, and the UN is pushing for family meetings, which took place until 2018, to resume.

Heenan stressed that the country does engage with the UN, including on human rights, and that the Korean Peninsula should not be discussed only in terms of peace and security. The views are those of the UN official, as given in the interview.