Wiesel, Havel Join the Fight To Free Korea

UNITED NATIONS — A Nobel prize-winning Holocaust survivor, an anti-Soviet dissident, and a former European premier called yesterday for U.N. Security Council action on North Korea for its “egregious” human rights record.Elie Wiesel, who survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and later won a Nobel peace prize, commissioned a 123-page report detailing North Korean atrocities. He did so with the dissident playwright and Czech president between 1989 and 2003, Václav Havel, and a former prime minister of Norway, Kjell Magne Bondevik.In the report, the three said the dispute over the country’s nuclear program should not eclipse deadly political repression there; rather, the council should open another path to influence North Korea by taking on Kim Jong Il’s regime over its treatment of the country’s 23 million people.While a unanimous October Security Council resolution imposed sanctions on North Korea over its October 9 nuclear test, the report is “urging the United Nations to get involved in the North Korea issue also from the human rights perspective,” Mr. Bondevik said by telephone from Norway.“Nowhere else in the world today is there such an abuse of rights, as institutionalized as it is in North Korea,” Mr. Bondevik told the Associated Press. “The leaders are committing crimes against humanity.”The report argues that Security Council action is warranted under a resolution unanimously approved in April by the 15-nation council that endorsed a 2005 agreement aimed at preventing tragedies like the 1994 Rwanda genocide.North Korea’s actions toward its people — like food policies that helped fuel a late-1990s famine that killed as many as 1 million people and a prison system holding about 200,000 political prisoners — present a non-traditional threat to international peace, which the report argues is covered by the recent resolution.The report, written by law firm DLA Piper and the nongovernmental organization U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, urged the Security Council to adopt a nonpunitive resolution that would demand unhindered access to North Korea by humanitarian workers, the release of all political prisoners, and the admission of U.N. human rights investigators.The report envisions a diplomatic process parallel to the one dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program.“Although, in recent weeks, the international focus has been on North Korea’s nuclear weapons test, the situation in that country is also one of the most egregious human rights and humanitarian disasters in the world today,” the report said.

Wiesel, Havel Join the Fight To Free Korea

Wiesel, Havel Join the Fight To Free Korea

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