North Korean Record on Rights Decried

At a hearing Tuesday of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, witnesses denounced North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il as “the worst” violator of human rights in the world today.

The independent federal watchdog agency, in session at the UCLA School of Law, held its first public hearing in Los Angeles before a large crowd made up mostly of Korean Americans. The topic was “North Korea: Human Rights Ground Zero.”

Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, which aids refugees, said Kim’s “crimes are far worse than Saddam Hussein, if you look at the numbers he has killed, his involvement in kidnapping Japanese and South Korean citizens, his international drug trafficking and counterfeiting, his proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

Commission Chairman Michael K. Young said he hoped that the session would be the start of a series of hearings on North Korea by the agency “to raise the profile of the issues of human rights, freedom of religion, thought, conscience and belief” and the refugee crisis.

“North Koreans have suffered through five decades of failed social, economic and political policies and human rights abuses,” said Young, dean of the George Washington University Law School.

“Just to give some context, I recently learned that the North Koreans have lowered the height requirements for adult male military conscripts from 4 feet 11 inches to 4 feet 2 inches, due to widespread stunted growth in the population.”

The commission, created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to monitor religious freedom around the world, advises the president, Congress and the State Department.

Testifying behind a partition to protect his identity, a North Korean-born Protestant pastor who works with North Korean refugees in China and South Korea, urged the panel to “defend the rights of 400,000 North Koreans struggling for survival in Northeast China by securing refugee status for them.”

“I plead with you to work with the Chinese and South Korean governments to establish humane refugee centers to care for them,” said the witness, identified as the Rev. Isaac, who has previously worked inside North Korea delivering Bibles.

He said a North Korean working with his ministry had been beaten to death with an iron pipe when he was caught with Bibles, after crossing from China into North Korea.

The pastor also said North Korea’s claim that it allows churches is a sham.

Also testifying before the commission was David Hawk, a senior researcher for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and author of “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps.”

North Koreans repatriated by China -- if they had any contact with South Korean Christians while in China or if they attended any church services there -- are executed or sentenced to life or other long terms at hard labor in the North Korean gulag, Hawk said he had been told by more than a dozen North Korean defectors.

Scholte testified that the United States must make human rights a part of its North Korea policy, along with trying to limit the development of nuclear weapons there.

“The same regimes that terrorize the world, terrorize their own people,” Scholte said.

“Human rights and nuclear proliferation are intrinsically linked, but all we ever focus on is the nuclear issue -- as if anyone born north of the 38th parallel does not deserve the same human rights as the rest of the world.”

Today the panel is meeting with two dozen Southland religious leaders to discuss its role and to exchange ideas.