North Korean security chiefs and possibly even Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un himself should face international justice for ordering systematic torture, starvation and mass killings bordering on genocide, the chairman of a U.N. investigation team told Reuters on Monday (February 17). The team told Kim in a letter it was advising the United Nations to refer the situation in North Korea to the International Criminal Court (ICC), to ensure any culprits were held accountable. "Well the conclusions have been that there are serious crimes against humanity, that they are numerous, they involve great affronts against international law and that someone has to be accountable for them," Michael Kirby, chairman of the independent Commission of Inquiry, said in an interview. "However, in a letter to the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jung-Un, I on behalf of the Commission of Inquiry called attention to the fact that he should be aware of the responsibility of all officials in the DPRK, in North Korea, for crimes against humanity, for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity or for turning the other way when there was evidence of crimes against humanity. And that that responsibility could possibly include himself," he said. He added that the crimes were reminiscent of those committed by Nazis during World War Two. "Some of them are strikingly similar," Kirby told Reuters. "For example, testimony was given to the commission of inquiry in relation to the prison camps, the political prison camps, of large numbers of people who were malnourished, who were effectively starved to death who then had to be disposed of in pots burned and then buried in such a way that their body parts were still unburned and it was the duty of other prisoners in the camps to dispose of them," he said. The investigators said they had also told Kim's main ally China that it might be "aiding and abetting crimes against humanity" by sending migrants and defectors back to North Korea, where they faced torture and execution. The unprecedented public warning and rebuke to a head of state by a U.N. Commission of Inquiry is likely to complicate efforts to persuade the isolated country to rein in its nuclear weapons programme and belligerent confrontations with South Korea and the West. North Korea said it "categorically and totally" rejected the report, which it called "a product of politicization of human rights on the part of EU and Japan in alliance with the U.S. hostile policy". "We will continue to strongly respond to the end to any attempt of regime-change and pressure under the pretext of 'human rights protection'," its diplomatic mission in Geneva said in a statement sent to Reuters. The independent investigators made their accusations in a 372-page report, the size of a telephone book, listing atrocities including murder, torture, rape, abductions, enslavement, starvation and executions. "What is unique is the combination. And if I can say so what is unique has been the capacity of North Korea to sail under the radar, to avoid international scrutiny, to avoid examination of its record over such a long time, effectively 60 years of very great wrongs against its population. Wrongs against the Christian population, wrongs against minorities, wrongs against women. These are, in their magnitude, in their gravity and in their number, are truly exceptional. And that's why the report of the Commission of inquiry will collect it all and provide it to the international community and I hope that there will be action," Kirby said. The report was the result of a year-long investigation involving public testimony by defectors, including former prison camp guards, at hearings held in South Korea, Japan, Britain and the United States. Defectors included Shin Dong-hyuk, who gave harrowing accounts of his life and escape from a prison camp. As a 13-year-old, he informed a prison guard of a plot by his mother and brother to escape and both were executed, according to a book on his life called "Escape from Camp 14". The abuses were mainly perpetrated by officials in structures that ultimately reported to Kim - state security, the Ministry of People's Security, the army, the judiciary and Workers' Party of Korea, according to the investigators, led by Kirby, a retired Australian chief justice. The team recommended targeted U.N. sanctions against civil officials and military commanders suspected of the worst crimes. It did not reveal any names, but said that it had compiled a database of suspected violators from evidence and testimony. North Korea's extermination of political prisoners over the past five decades might amount to genocide, the report said, although the legal definition of genocide normally refers to the killing of large parts of a national, ethnic or religious group.

• published: 17 Feb 2014
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