A Push to Investigate North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses

BEIJING â€" Could North Korea be headed toward an international inquiry into possible crimes against humanity

Maybe, with the United Nations Human Rights Council due to meet today in Geneva to hear a report by a U.N. investigator urging the setting up of a commission of inquiry into human rights abuses in the country.

The proposal is expected to be approved by the 47-member council later in March, as my colleagues Nick Cumming-Bruce and Choe Sang-hun report.

The moves come as analysts watch closely for signs of cooling ties between North Korea and China, its long-term supporter and only major ally, following Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test and its threats to attack South Korea and the United States. As another colleague, Jane Perlez, reports, while the Chinese government is not changing its position in ublic, there are signs that an increasingly substantial debate is under way here, not just among officials but also more broadly among analysts, on the wisdom of continued support.

As Jane reports, a senior Communist Party official, Qiu Yuanping, described a spirited debate last week at the Chinese Political People’s Consultative Conference in Beijing over whether China should “keep or dump” North Korea and whether China, as a major power, should “fight or talk” with the North.

The move at the U.N. also comes days after a new report from Amnesty International appeared to show a de facto expansion of North Korea’s prison camp system.

According to new satellite imagery commissioned by Amnesty, the North Korean government is “blurring the lines between its political prison camps and the surrounding population,” raising fears that it is spreading the camps into the general population.

Up to 200,000 people are believed to live in the camps and conditions are “extremely harrowing,” according to U.N. investigations.

“Analysts found that from 2006 to February 2013, North Korea constructed 20 km of perimeter around the Ch’oma-Bong valley â€" located 70 km north-northeast of Pyongyang â€" and its inhabitants,” Amnesty wrote in the report, with “new controlled access points and a number of probable guard towers.”

Activity around a site known as Camp No. 14 “points to a tightening in the control of movement of the local population,” Amnesty wrote, “thus muddying the line between those detained in the political prison camp and the valley’s inhabitants.”

“What’s most worrisome is that it seems to expand the scope of control beyond the formal boundaries of the prison camp,” The Associated Pres quoted Frank Jannuzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA, as saying.

Mr. Jannuzi, a former U.S. Congressional staffer who has been to North Korea several times, said the country is not the “black box” it’s often made out to be, given that foreign charities and aid groups operate there, and that there is some tourism.

Yet the “crackdowns are worse than before and there are more suicides happening among the elderly and children without families,” a North Korean told the NK Daily News, a Seoul-based news Web site, comparing conditions under the current leader, Kim Jong-un, to those under his father, Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011.

“Life hasn’t been this hard at any point since the March of Tribulation at the end of the ’90s,” the North Korean was quoted as saying, referring to the famine that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, as North Korea lost an ally and sour! ce of sup! port.

“Last year the authorities mobilized everyone for various events, and heavily regulated the markets, while now they are going on about combat readiness,” said the North Korean, who NK Daily News said lives in Gangwon Province in the North. “This has given people much more difficult lives.” The North Korean added that the belief that life was better under Kim Jong-il “is becoming more common.”