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STORY: OHCHR / DPRK
TRT: 02:54
SOURCE: OHCHR
RESTRICTIONS: CREDIT FOR PICTURES USED AS BACKDROPS: SARAM – FOUNDATION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN NORTH KOREA
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 12 SEPTEMBER 2025, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1. Covers of UN Human Rights reports are used as backdrops
2. Pictures of North Korea are use as backdrops, credit SARAM – Foundation for Human Rights in North Korea
26 AUGUST 2025, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
3. 3. SOUNDBITE (English) James Heenan, UN Human Rights Representative Seoul, Korea:
“Well, the conclusion of the report is that overall the situation has certainly not improved since 2014 despite these isolated areas of sub-improvement but overall has remained the same or in many areas degraded. Of key concern for us in the UN Human Rights Office is the increase in executions and the increase of the number of crimes that attract the death penalty. You can now be not just jailed for watching foreign media but you can in some cases be executed for watching and distributing it. We're concerned about the ongoing existence of political prison camps which have been there for many many decades. Those institutions are a total anomaly in 2025, and the report calls for those prison camps to be closed. We are concerned about the ongoing situation of enforced disappearance. DPRK is responsible for the forced disappearance of, as we estimate, about 100,000 people, including Korean citizens and also foreign nationals, notably from Japan. For this report, we've interviewed almost 400 who have escaped in the last ten-year period. It’s a very mixed group of people. Some people, many people escape for purely economic reasons, they are looking to support themselves and their families, they're looking to escape ongoing hunger and lack of opportunities. Others, at the other end of the scale, we have fairly high level defectors, often diplomats and senior officials who have been abroad and who have decided to defect while abroad and they bring a very different perspective and they come for different reasons. We have another group who are people who have some problem in DPRK, they have some conflict with the law. And they feel they need to leave the country in order to avoid a very long prison sentence and so forth. The stories are, in many ways, heartbreaking because, as many victims tell us, no one leaves their home voluntarily. They don't want to leave their home. They feel as though they have to leave their home. We hear this again and again. They say, ‘we just needed a better life for our children. We wanted to escape hunger.’ One of the escapists says, ‘every time I see food left over on a plate in Seoul, I feel bad because I know how starving people are in parts of North Korea at certain times.’ Some people leave their children in North Korea and other members of the family and that's particularly heartbreaking and they have to be very careful what they do because there could be ramifications for their families depending on what they do and say.”
UN Human Rights Office has published a report on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), which is a follow-up to the 2014 report by the UN Commission of Inquiry into the human rights situation in the DPRK.
James Heenan, UN Human Rights Representative in Seoul, Korea said, “The conclusion of the report is that overall the situation has certainly not improved since 2014 despite these isolated areas of sub-improvement but overall has remained the same or in many areas degraded. Of key concern for us in the UN Human Rights Office is the increase in executions and the increase of the number of crimes that attract the death penalty.”
He also said, “You can now be not just jailed for watching foreign media but you can in some cases be executed for watching and distributing it. We're concerned about the ongoing existence of political prison camps which have been there for many many decades. Those institutions are a total anomaly in 2025, and the report calls for those prison camps to be closed. We are concerned about the ongoing situation of enforced disappearance.”
Heenan added, “DPRK is responsible for the forced disappearance of, as we estimate, about 100,000 people, including Korean citizens and also foreign nationals, notably from Japan. For this report, we've interviewed almost 400 who have escaped in the last ten-year period. It’s a very mixed group of people. Some people, many people escape for purely economic reasons, they are looking to support themselves and their families, they're looking to escape ongoing hunger and lack of opportunities. Others, at the other end of the scale, we have fairly high level defectors, often diplomats and senior officials who have been abroad and who have decided to defect while abroad and they bring a very different perspective and they come for different reasons. We have another group who are people who have some problem in DPRK, they have some conflict with the law. And they feel they need to leave the country in order to avoid a very long prison sentence and so forth.”
He concluded, “The stories are, in many ways, heartbreaking because, as many victims tell us, no one leaves their home voluntarily. They don't want to leave their home. They feel as though they have to leave their home. We hear this again and again. They say, ‘we just needed a better life for our children. We wanted to escape hunger.’ One of the escapists says, ‘every time I see food left over on a plate in Seoul, I feel bad because I know how starving people are in parts of North Korea at certain times.’ Some people leave their children in North Korea and other members of the family and that's particularly heartbreaking and they have to be very careful what they do because there could be ramifications for their families depending on what they do and say.”
