Thomas Buergenthal, who served on the International Court of Justice, is one of three jurists who has concluded that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un should be tried for crimes against humanity for the way his regime uses brutal political prisons to control the population.
"I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps and in my long professional career in the human rights field," said Buergenthal, who was in Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen as a child, as well as the ghetto of Kielce, Poland.
He was part of a panel that also included Navi Pillay, a South African judge who presided over the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda and then became the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, and Mark Harmon, an American judge who worked on the Yugoslavia and Cambodia war crimes cases.
The three heard evidence from former prisoners, prison guards and experts as part of an inquiry initiated by the International Bar Association.The resulting report, which will be published Tuesday, found that there was ample evidence to charge the Kim regime with 10 of the 11 internationally recognized war crimes — including murder, enslavement, torture and sexual violence — because of its use of political prison camps.
"There is not a comparable situation anywhere in the world, past or present," Pillay said. "This is really an atrocity at the maximum level, where the whole population is subject to intimidation."
Three generations of Kims have ruled North Korea as a totalitarian state defined by an all-encompassing personality cult that treats the leaders as demi-gods. Anyone who questions the leaders or the system is liable to be thrown in a penal labor colony — often for life, and often together with three generations of their families to eliminate the "seed" of "enemies of the state."
Experts estimate there are as many as 130,000 North Koreans held in four huge camps, where they are forced to do hard labor, often in mines, and receive very little in the way of food, clothing or heating. The regime also operates "re-education" camps for lesser offenses. They are just as brutal, but prisoners there generally serve fixed terms.
"I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps and in my long professional career in the human rights field," said Buergenthal, who was in Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen as a child, as well as the ghetto of Kielce, Poland.
He was part of a panel that also included Navi Pillay, a South African judge who presided over the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda and then became the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, and Mark Harmon, an American judge who worked on the Yugoslavia and Cambodia war crimes cases.
The three heard evidence from former prisoners, prison guards and experts as part of an inquiry initiated by the International Bar Association.The resulting report, which will be published Tuesday, found that there was ample evidence to charge the Kim regime with 10 of the 11 internationally recognized war crimes — including murder, enslavement, torture and sexual violence — because of its use of political prison camps.
"There is not a comparable situation anywhere in the world, past or present," Pillay said. "This is really an atrocity at the maximum level, where the whole population is subject to intimidation."
Three generations of Kims have ruled North Korea as a totalitarian state defined by an all-encompassing personality cult that treats the leaders as demi-gods. Anyone who questions the leaders or the system is liable to be thrown in a penal labor colony — often for life, and often together with three generations of their families to eliminate the "seed" of "enemies of the state."
Experts estimate there are as many as 130,000 North Koreans held in four huge camps, where they are forced to do hard labor, often in mines, and receive very little in the way of food, clothing or heating. The regime also operates "re-education" camps for lesser offenses. They are just as brutal, but prisoners there generally serve fixed terms.
North Korea's extensive human rights abuses were documented in a landmark U.N. Commission of Inquiry report in 2014. Following on from that, the International Bar Association decided to conduct an inquiry specifically into the political prison camps.
The three judges heard testimony and read affidavits from former prisoners and prison guards in North Korea, covering a period from 1970 to 2006.
The panel heard about starving prisoners who were executed after being caught scavenging for food and about the deaths of countless prisoners from malnutrition and overwork, sometimes a result of 20-hour days in the mines.
The judges also heard about rapes and the forced abortions of resulting pregnancies, sometimes leading to the women's deaths.
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