GENEVA – The UN warned Tuesday of a deeply institutionalizsed system of forced labor in North Korea, which in some cases could amount to the crime against humanity of enslavement.
In a damning report, the United Nations rights office detailed how people in the reclusive and authoritarian country were “controlled and exploited through an extensive and multi-layered system of forced labor.”
“The testimonies in this report give a shocking and distressing insight into the suffering inflicted through forced labour upon people,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.
“These people are forced to work in intolerable conditions — often in dangerous sectors with the absence of pay, free choice, ability to leave, protection, medical care, time off, food and shelter,” he said.
Many faced regular beatings and women were “exposed to continuing risks of sexual violence”, he added.
The rights office relied on a range of sources for the report, including 183 interviews conducted between 2015 and 2023 with victims and witnesses who escaped North Korea and were living abroad.
“If we didn’t meet the daily quota, we were beaten and our food was cut,” said one victim cited in the report.
The latest allegations follow a landmark report published by a UN team of investigators a decade ago which documented forced labor among other rampant rights abuses such as deliberate starvation, rape and torture in North Korea.
Tuesday’s report zeroed in on an institutionalized system, with six different types of forced labour, including during the country’s 10-year minimum military conscription.
There were also compulsory state-assigned jobs and the use of revolutionary “Shock Brigades”, or state-organised groups of citizens forced to carry out “arduous manual labour”, often in construction and agriculture, the report said.
Such projects can last for months and even years, during which time workers must live on site and receive little or no remuneration, it found.
There were also other forms of work mobilisations, including of school children, and work performed by people sent abroad to earn foreign currency for the state, it said.
North Koreans have for instance reportedly been sent to help build facilities ahead of the football World Cup events in Russia and Qatar.
Tuesday’s report stressed that those sent abroad lose up to 90 percent of their wages to the state, work under constant surveillance, and have their passports confiscated, with almost no time off.
The system “acts as a means for the state to control, monitor and indoctrinate the population”, the report said, adding that in some instances the level of control and exploitation “may reach the threshold of ‘ownership.”
This, it said, may “constitute the crime against humanity of enslavement”.
The most serious concerns surrounded places of detention, where forced labour victims systematically had to work under threat of physical violence and in inhumane conditions, it said.
Tuesday’s report called on North Korea to “end forced labor in all its forms”, “end slavery and slavery-like practices,” and “abolish the use of child labor,” among a long list of recommendations.
It also called on the UN Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.
