NORTH KOREA

Special issue

UNHCR in China under fire at an international press conference on North Korean refugees

Media coverage:

Associated Press: U.N. urged to help North Korean refugees

Washington Post: North Korean refugee advocates turn to U.N.

New York Times: China facing protests over the plight of North Korean refugees

2 December 2002

U.N. urged to help North Korean refugees

By Audrey McAvoy

Associated Press (27.11.2002)/HRWF International Secretariat (02.12.2002) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net CC Humanitarian assistance groups urged the United Nations to help North Koreans refugees in China, saying Wednesday that only the international body has the authority to prevent the "human tragedy" from getting worse.

Aid groups delivering food and clothing to North Koreans in hiding in northeastern China say they have been unable to continue their activities because of a police crackdown that came after dozens of North Koreans sought asylum in China in foreign diplomatic missions and a German school.

Willy Fautre, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers, said the United Nations has the legal power to demand that China allow access to the refugees.

"The keys to the solution of the human tragedy are in the hands of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees," Fautre said at a news conference in Tokyo.

He estimated that 300,000 North Koreans are in China after fleeing starvation and political persecution in their isolated communist homeland. Most of the North Koreans are believed to be waiting for a chance to defect to South Korea.

China refuses to treat them as refugees, saying they are illegal economic migrants. A treaty with North Korea, a Chinese ally, requires Beijing to send asylum seekers back.

However, China has not done so in cases that have become public, possibly out of concern that it could cause an international outcry. Since March, more than 100 North Korean asylum seekers have been allowed to go to South Korea and other countries.

On Wednesday, UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski said the international agency's numerous requests to be given access to the refugees had been denied by China. Under an 1995 agreement with the United Nations, China is supposed to grant UNHCR officials full access to refugees in China.

"We're as frustrated as the NGO (non-governmental organization) community," said Janowski, reached at the agency's headquarters in Geneva.

"China must acknowledge that some of the North Koreans may be refugees, and therefore they should give us access," he said.

Human Rights Without Frontiers' Fautre said the plight of refugees is harrowing. They spend their every waking moment evading Chinese authorities, he said.

"They live in fear of the Chinese police and of being repatriated," he said. Some refugees have told aid workers that they keep poison in their pockets so they can commit suicide and avoid being sent back, Fuatre said.

Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who spent more than a year in North Korea, said North Korean law calls for defectors to be put to death.

North Korean refugee advocates turn to U.N.

China cracks down at foreign missions

By Doug Struck

Washington Post Foreign Service (28.11.2002)/HRWF International Secretariat (02.12.2002) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Activists involved in several highly publicized attempts by North Korean refugees to storm into foreign diplomatic missions in China for protection say a Chinese police crackdown has forced them to largely abandon the tactic.

Instead, they said they plan to step up pressure on the U.N. refugee agency to "start doing their job" by monitoring the Korean refugees in China, despite government restrictions on its work.

Officials of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have acted like "naive schoolchildren" in the face of the problem, said Tarik Radwan, a Fairfax, Va., lawyer working on human rights. "It's not just apathy; it's culpable negligence to the point of complicity."

Chinese authorities have insisted that UNHCR does not have jurisdiction over the thousands of North Koreans who have fled their impoverished country and are hiding in China. The refugees, vulnerable to exploitation, are also subject to arrest and repatriation to North Korea, where they could face harsh punishment. China calls them "economic migrants," not refugees.

Estimates of the number of Koreans hiding in China range from 10,000 to 300,000.

"UNHCR has been pushing the Chinese government for access to that border region so we can access the situation and see for ourselves," said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the agency at its headquarters in Geneva. "But to date, we don't have authority for regular visits," he said. "We need the cooperation of the national government to move around."

The head of the UNHCR field office in Beijing declined to comment.

Human rights activists acknowledged at a news conference here today that the Chinese have effectively blunted their strategy of sending Korean refugees streaming past guards at diplomatic compounds in Beijing and Shenyang to request asylum.

The tactic generated international headlines when a group of about 25 North Koreans ran into the Spanish Embassy compound in March, threatening to commit suicide if they were evicted. After they were sent to South Korea, the tactic was copied dozens of times, with mixed success. The refugees' cat-and-mouse game with police outside diplomatic missions has led to scuffles between police and South Korean diplomats and a row with Japan when Koreans were dragged out of its embassy grounds.

Authorities have erected barbed wire and greatly beefed up security around the embassies, and have clamped down on the Korean community and outside activists elsewhere in the country. One of those at the news conference, Hiroshi Kato, was held and questioned by police for six days this month, and another activist acknowledged that "our local activities are almost all destroyed."

The Chinese government also has trumped the publicity value of the storming tactic by allowing most of the refugees who made it into embassies to leave eventually for third countries.

"They came out looking like a moderate regime," said Radwan, the lawyer.

"We have to shift tactics," said Norbert Vollertsen, a German physician who has waged a campaign against the government since he was expelled from North Korea in December 2000.

Attempts to storm embassies might not end entirely. Vollertsen, who arranged for news coverage of at least two such efforts, said the publicity has led to dozens of individual efforts to get inside embassies, and they may continue.

And Kato, who runs a Japan-based organization called Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, said his group has not said whether it will abandon the tactic. When he was released, Chinese authorities banned Kato from China for five years.

China facing protests over the plight of North Korean refugees

By James Brooke

New York Times (29.11.2002)/ HRWF International Secretariat (02.12.2002) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net Human rights advocates who have been trying to draw attention to the plight of tens of thousands of North Korean refugees in China are shifting their tactics, six leaders of the efforts have announced. Instead of helping groups invade foreign embassies in China to seek asylum, they will support protests at Chinese diplomatic missions and at United Nations offices around the world.

One of the advocates, Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor known for his provocative style, said that he plans to lead a protest rally to the Chinese Embassy in Washington next week.

A bill is progressing through the United States Congress that would earmark up to $80 million to help feed, clothe and move to safety people who escape the North Korean Communist dictatorship.

But increasingly, North Korea is in the public eye, not only for the nuclear weapons program to which it admitted recently, but also for its abuse of its own citizens. Human Rights Watch, the New York-based human rights group, recently released a report, "The Invisible Exodus: North Koreans in the People's Republic of China."

Saying that as many as 300,000 North Koreans made their way across the border to live clandestinely in northern China, the report called the situation "a human rights disaster." The group demanded that China immediately stop forcible repatriations, some of which end in death.

On Wednesday, the human rights advocates denounced the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, saying the agency had surrendered its protection mission in face of Chinese obstruction.

"The U.N.H.C.R. will be the target of our actions in the future," warned Willy Fautr, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers, a Brussels-based group.

Over the last half century, China has signed several agreements with the United Nations pledging to refrain from repatriating migrants until it can be determined if they are economic or political refugees. In practice, China has closed the refugee areas to the United Nations.

China appears to fear an uncontrollable influx of North Koreans if it applies the Human Rights Watch prescription: an end to forcible repatriation, screening of refugees by the refugee agency and the awarding of "an indefinite humanitarian status" to "all North Koreans in China."

"The one agency with the authority to force a solution has chosen to sit on its hands," said Tarik M. Radwan, a lawyer for Jubilee Campaign, U.S.A., a religious-based human-rights group from Fairfax, Va.

Such criticism was rejected at the Geneva headquarters of the 51-year-old refugee agency this week.

"Picketing our offices does not solve the problem," Kris Janowski, the agency's spokesman, said by telephone. "We don't run China."

"We have a longstanding request with the Chinese to get access to the border," he continued. "Where we are hosted by a government, we have to operate with a government's consent."

Mr. Radwan, the American lawyer, said of China's actions: "An iron curtain has been brought down. No one is getting to the border areas."

Kim Guang Choel, a 27-year-old former railway worker in North Korea who arrived in South Korea last summer with his wife and daughter, contended in an interview that if refugees were guaranteed safe passage, "The cities will be empty. It will take only six months for there to be a flood."