Foreign Embassies: Safe Havens for North Korean Defectors? (1)

Video of Korean refugees triggers Japan-China rift

Chinese Guards Dragged Out North Korean Defectors From A Japanese Consulate

Asylum denied in China

13 May 2002

Video of Korean refugees triggers Japan-China rift

By James Brooke

The New York Times (11.05.2002) - Japan's national anger and humiliation deepened Friday as television stations repeatedly aired a video showing Chinese policemen invading a Japanese consulate, knocking over a 2- year-old-girl, wrestling her mother into submission and dragging away her aunt who was five months pregnant.

In the video, three employees of the Japanese consulate in Shenyang can be seen acquiescing Wednesday morning to the removal from the consulate and abduction of five North Korea defectors. One employee can be seen stooping to pick up the hats of Chinese policemen that had fallen off.

"This is a clear violation of international law and we will never make concessions," Yoriko Kawaguchi, the Japanese foreign minister, said Friday. Demanding the immediate release of the five asylum seekers, the minister warned that the arrest video could damage relations between China and Japan. "The longer settlement of this is drawn out, the more these pictures will be shown all over the world."

Hours before a five-member government fact-finding mission was to start, Misako Kaji, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, said, "Japan is asking that the people who were abducted out of the consulate should be returned." From Beijing, Yonhap, the South Korean press agency, reported that China was planning to release the five to a third country. Separately, American diplomats in Beijing were negotiating the transfer of the five refugees to a third country in less than a week.

But the damage to Japan-China relations may be long lasting. Kenzo Yoneda, a governing party congressman said Friday, "We should demand the government to take strong measures, including the immediate halt of economic aid to China."

Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo, warned: "Unless China observes these rules, it will not be accepted completely in the international society."

Ryutaro Hashimoto, a former prime minister, told a visiting Chinese delegation, "The Chinese officers' action dumped cold water on Japanese people's feelings." Japanese officials noted Friday that the three North Koreans who took refuge in the U.S. consulate in Shenyang were neither expelled nor dragged out by the police. U.S. officials were negotiating in Beijing for these three men to be sent to a third country.

The worst case scenario would be deportation to North Korea, a secretive state where defectors returned by China have been forced to go to work in labor camps. On South Korea's SBS radio Thursday, Jang Gil Su, a relative of some of the detainees, said, "My mother is known to have been detained in March last year and held in a camp for political prisoners. Please help my relatives come here safely."

Chinese guards dragged out North Korean defectors from a Japanese Consulate

By Yohei Suda (Correspondent Human Rights Without Frontiers)

HRWF (13.05.2002)/ Email info@hrwf.net - Website http://www.hrwf.net - On Wednesday, 8 May 2002, five defectors from North Korea were forced out from a Japanese Consulate by the police guarding the consulate in Shenyang, China, after they entered into the premise of the Japanese consulate. Two of the five defectors reached all the way to the waiting room inside the consulate building before the Chinese guards caught them and removed them from the consulate. Three others were caught by the guards right at the gate, still on the premise of the consulate, and dragged out.

The five defectors are Kwan-chul Kim, Sun-hi Kim, Han-mi Kim (Daughter of Kwan-chul Kim and Sun-hi Kim), Sung-guk Kim and Kyong-suk Jung. They are the relatives of defectors from North Korea whom South Korea granted asylum last year.

On the same day, two other defectors from North Korea successfully entered into the United States Consulate in Shenyang, seeking asylum. One more defectors followed on the next day, climbing the wall of the United States Consulate.

This incident is the latest of the recent moves in which defectors from North Korea enter into embassies or consulates in China to seek asylum. In March, 25 defectors from North Korea ran into Spanish Embassy in Beijing and sought a political asylum in South Korea. They arrived in South Korea through Philippines after the negotiation. Other defectors ran into the United States Embassy and German Embassy in Beijing.

While China allows defectors from North Korea to go to the countries of their choice through a third country in recent cases, Chinas official position is that defectors must be sent back to North Korea.

According to Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on Consulate Relations, the authorities of the receiving state are not allowed to enter the part of the consular premises used exclusively for the purpose of the work of the consular post unless there is consent of the head of the consular post. In this case, the guards got into the premise of the Japanese Consulate and forced five defectors out of the consulate. Thus, Japan is claiming that China violated Article 31 by the guards entry into the premise of the Japanese Consulate without consent. China first claimed that the guard took the action to protect the Japanese Consulate from "the terrorist" and is now claiming that there was consent.

If Chinese guards entered into the premise of the Japanese Consulate, such an entry is serious misconduct on Chinese side, especially in light of the consequence in case the defectors are sent back to North Korea. In many cases, they are sent to a "correction camp" and death is waiting for them if they are sent back. There is a serious concern for human rights of these defectors.

On the other hand, officers in the Japanese Consulate did not take appropriate measures to protect the five defectors who entered into the premise, regardless of the existence of consent. The officers made no move to intervene.

Given that their lives and basic human rights are at stake, Human Rights Without Frontiers urges:

• the Chinese Government to respect the defectors human dignity and basic human rights, so that they will be allowed to go to and get settled in the country of their choice
• the Japanese Government to negotiate with the Chinese Government in such a way as to respect the defectors human dignity and basic human rights, as well as to be more aware of the serious nature of this defector issue.

Asylum denied in China

The Washington Post (13.05.2002) - The Japanese government is rightly outraged by China's treatment of North Korean refugees who tried to seek asylum in the Japanese Consulate in Shenyang last Wednesday. A videotape clearly shows that Chinese security officers tackled two women who had already passed through the consulate gates and dragged them back out, together with a small child. Two men who accompanied them were later taken out of the consulate building. This intrusion was a clear violation of international law, which stipulates that diplomatic properties cannot be entered by local police without permission.

Even worse, it was carried out in pursuit of an inhumane policy: denying asylum to refugees fleeing the famine and brutality of one of the world's most terrible dictatorships. Japan is correctly demanding that the five North Koreans be returned by China to the consulate. They, like the three other refugees now inside the U.S. Consulate in Shenyang, should be allowed to leave the country.

Saving those eight North Koreans, however, is not enough. The incidents last week should serve to revive a much larger issue that the international community has played down for too long. By most estimates, there are now 150,000 to 300,000 North Korean refugees in China. Desperate to find food, escape the ubiquitous political police or exercise common human rights, they have risked their lives to sneak across the border. Without doubt they are among the world's most desperate people. And yet, rather than help them or even allow international agencies to aid them, China refuses to recognize their status.

Regularly, it rounds up hundreds or thousands of the escapees and sends them back to North Korea, where they face torture or confinement to labor camps. Rather than provide food to the starving, Beijing fines those Chinese citizens who do so - and pays bounties to those who turn in the Koreans.

This outrageous conduct, like the penetration of the Japanese Consulate, is a violation of international law. China is a signatory to a 50-year-old international convention on the protection of refugees, and is obliged by it not to send refugees who seek asylum back to areas where they could face persecution. It is hard to imagine a people in flight who fit that description more fully than the North Koreans.

If Beijing is unwilling to screen and aid the refugees itself, then it should allow the UN High Commissioner for Refugees access to the border region, something it has refused to do.

Neither the United Nations nor Western governments have pressed Beijing hard enough on this matter. The assumption seems to be that China cannot be expected to take action that might embarrass its fellow Communist regime. But if China can commit to the rules of the World Trade Organization, it should no longer be allowed to flout the refugee convention with impunity.

Japan, America and other Western states must make clear to Beijing that the way to avoid further incidents around consulates and embassies is to use the office of the UN agency, rather than its security thugs, to manage a problem that will not go away.