SEOUL
(Reuters) - North Korea carries out public executions on river banks and at
school grounds and marketplaces for charges such as stealing copper from
factory
machines, distributing media from South Korea and prostitution, a
report issued on Wednesday said.
The report,
by a Seoul-based non-government group, said the often extra-judicial decisions
for public executions are frequently influenced by "bad" family
background or a government campaign to discourage certain behavior.
The
Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) said its report was based on
interviews with 375 North Korean defectors from the isolated state over a
period of two years.
Reuters
could not independently verify the testimony of defectors in the report. The TJWG
is made up of human rights activists and researchers and is led by Lee
Younghwan, who has worked as an advocate for human rights in North Korea.
It receives
most of its funding from the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy, which
in turn is funded by the U.S. Congress.
The TJWG
report aims to document the locations of public killings and mass burials,
which it says had not been done previously, to support an international push to
hold to account those who commit what it describes as crimes against humanity.
"The
maps and the accompanying testimonies create a picture of the scale of the
abuses that have taken place over decades," the group said.
North Korea
rejects charges of human rights abuses, saying its citizens enjoy protection
under the constitution and accuses the United States of being the world's worst
rights violator.
However, the
North has faced an unprecedented push to hold the regime and its leader, Kim
Jong Un, accountable for a wide range of rights abuses since a landmark 2014 report
by a United Nations commission.
U.N. member
countries urged the Security Council in 2014 to consider referring North Korea
and its leader to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against
humanity, as alleged in a Commission of Inquiry report.
The
commission detailed abuses including large prison camps, systematic torture,
starvation and executions comparable to Nazi-era atrocities, and linked the
activities to the North's leadership.
North Korea
has rejected that inquiry's findings and the push to bring the North to a
tribunal remains stalled due in part to objections by China and Russia, which
hold veto powers at the U.N. Security Council.
TJWG said
its project to map the locations of mass graves and executions has the
potential to contribute to documentation that could back the push for
accountability and future efforts to bring the North to justice.
It said
executions are carried out in prison camps to incite fear and intimidation
among potential escapees, and public executions are carried out for seemingly
minor crimes, including the theft of farm produce such as corn and rice.
Stealing
electric cables and other commodities from factories to sell them and
distribution of South Korean-produced media are also subject to executions,
which are most commonly administered by shooting, it said.
Testimonies
also showed people can be beaten to death, with one interviewee saying:
"Some crimes were considered not worth wasting bullets on."
Government
officials were executed on corruption and espionage charges, and bureaucrats
from other regions would be made to watch "as a deterrence tactic",
the report said.
Defectors
from the North have previously testified to having witnessed public executions
and rights abuses at detention facilities.
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