Dozens of North Korean defectors caught by secret police ‘vanish’, says rights group

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By Hyonhee Shin

SEOUL (Reuters) – More than 100 North Koreans have gone missing after being caught by secret police while trying to defect from the isolated country or even for trying to call relatives in South Korea, a Seoul-based human rights group said on Thursday. 

The Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) released a report detailing patterns of enforced disappearances through its study based on interviews with 62 North Korean escapees in South Korea.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans have defected in the decades since the Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, with many of those caught or repatriated sent to prison camps or other detention facilities before being released.

The group identified 113 people in 66 disappearance cases, including the cases in an archive run with other international organisations, as well as maps depicting transfer routes. 

Of the 113, 80%, or 90, were arrested inside North Korea and the rest in China or Russia, with about 30% disappearing since leader Kim Jong Un took power in late 2011. 

Almost 40% of them went missing after being caught trying to flee the country, while 26% took responsibility for another family member’s crime. Nearly 9% were accused of being in touch with those in South Korea or other countries. 

More than 81% vanished after being transferred to and detained by the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the North’s secret police known as “bowibu”, according to the report. 

An interviewee who defected to the South in 2018 from the Chinese border city of Hyesan said his friend was arrested by the MSS while trying to recover a Chinese mobile phone hidden in the mountains, and was now rumoured to have died. 

“Once (the MSS) finds call records with South Korea, they are considered serious offences,” the interviewee was quoted in the report as saying.

Kang Jeong-hyun, director of the project, said the report was intended to underscore enforced disappearances committed by the Kim regime as transnational crimes also involving China and Russia. 

The report was published just days before the U.N. Human Rights Council is due to issue its five-yearly Universal Periodic Review on North Korea.

The United Nations estimates up to 200,000 people are held in a vast network of gulags run by the MSS, many of them for political reasons. A 2014 U.N. Commission of Inquiry report said the prisoners faced torture, rape, forced labour, starvation and other inhumane treatment.

Pyongyang has long denounced defectors as “human scum”, and Kim has further tightened border controls over the past few years. 

The North’s Korea Association for Human Rights Studies this month rejected a U.N. report on its human rights violations including forced disappearances, calling them “fabrications” and a conspiracy by the West to escalate confrontation and tarnish the country’s image.

Beijing has denied there are any North Korean defectors in China, instead describing them as illegal economic migrants. 

(This story has been refiled to fix a typo in the headline)