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GENEVA / DPRK
STORY: GENEVA / DPRK
TRT: 2.22
SOURCE: CH UNTV
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 14 JANUARY 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
14 JANUARY 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1. Wide shot, exterior of the Palais des Nations
2. Cutaway, Rupert Colville walking
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Rupert Colville, Spokesperson for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights:
“We felt enough is enough. There really needs to be serious international focus on the human rights situation because currently that isn’t happening really. The attention is all on the nuclear issue on the launching of rockets, but this drastically awful situation of millions of North Koreans is pretty much off the international radar.”
FILE – OCTOBER 2012, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
4. Cutaway, UN logo in briefing room
14 JANUARY 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Rupert Colville, Spokesperson for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights:
“Pretty much all we know is coming from refugees who’ve escaped from North Korea, but the picture they paint is really terrible. You’re talking about a situation that has no parallel anywhere in the world. A camp system that is believed to hold 200,000, no one really knows for sure, some of whom were born there, spend pretty much all their lives there. A situation where they can be executed for pretty much nothing, for just saying a few things that aren’t politically correct, where people are tortured, women reportedly raped by camp guards., a complete lack of rule of law of any sort.”
FILE – OCTOBER 2012, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
6. Cutaway, UN logo in briefing room
14 JANUARY 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Rupert Colville, Spokesperson for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights:
“An international inquiry that might be instituted here at the Human Rights Council would put a very strong spotlight on the situation in a way that we haven’t had in living memory.”
FILE – OCTOBER 2012, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
8. Cutaway, UN logo in briefing room
14 JANUARY 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Rupert Colville, Spokesperson for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights:
“The allegations of what’s taking place in North Korea, especially in this prison camps system are really of enormous gravity, and could in some cases amount to crimes against humanity.”
FILE – OCTOBER 2012, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
10. Cutaway, UN logo in briefing room
14 JANUARY 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Rupert Colville, Spokesperson for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights:
“One woman described how they’re given so little food, so little medical care when she had her first baby daughter she actually had to wrap her in leaves there was no clothing for her.”
FILE – 2011, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
12. Cutaway, UN Flag
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights today (14 January) called for the international community to put much more effort into tackling the human rights situation of people in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
“We felt enough is enough”, Rupert Colville, the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay told UNTV in Geneva. Noting that all the attention on the DPRK was only focusing on the nuclear issue, on the launching of rockets, Colville stressed that there really needed to be “serious international focus on the human rights situation because currently that isn’t happening really”.
Regarding the human rights information coming from the country, Colville said,
“Pretty much all we know is coming from refugees who’ve escaped from North Korea.” He said the picture painted by those refugees was “really terrible,” adding that there was evidence of “a camp system believed to hold 200,000.”
Colville also said that the allegations of what was taking place in North Korea, especially in the prison camps system, “are really of enormous gravity, and could in some cases amount to crimes against humanity.”
Last month, Pillay met with two survivors of the country’s political prison camps, which are believed to contain more than 200,000 people. The two survivors described the harsh conditions prisoners live in, which include torture, rape, slave labour and other forms of collective punishment. They also lack food supplies, medical care and adequate clothing.
Condemning the “deplorable” human rights situation in the DPRK and urging the international community to launch an inquiry into serious crimes that had been persistent in the country for decades, Navi Pillay said in a statement that there were some initial hopes that the advent of a new leader might bring about some positive change in the human rights situation in DPRK”, but, she added, “a year after Kim Jong Un became the country’s new supreme leader, we see almost no sign of improvement”.
In a statement issued earlier Monday, Pillay said “I am also concerned that, at the international level, the spotlight is almost exclusively focused on DPRK’s nuclear programme and rocket launches. While these, of course, are issues of enormous importance, they should not be allowed to overshadow the deplorable human rights situation in DPRK, which in one way or another affects almost the entire population and has no parallel anywhere else in the world.”
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