Seoul, May 29 (IANS/EFE): South Korea is set to be home to a new UN office dedicated to supervising the human rights situation in neighbouring North Korea, South Korea's foreign ministry said Thursday.
The new branch of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights will be located in Seoul, a ministry spokesperson told Efe.
The office will try to collect data on alleged abuses against the people of North Korea by Kim Jong-un's regime, that the last UN report came to consider "crimes against humanity" comparable to those committed by German Nazis or during apartheid in South Africa.
The UN decided to set up the new office in South Korea due to its geographical proximity to North Korea, the common language between the countries, and accessibility to victims of human rights abuses who managed to escape and settle down in the neighbouring country, the spokesperson explained.
In March, Michael Kirby, the chair of the Commission of Inquiry to investigate human rights violations in North Korea, presented a report on human rights in the Communist country based on the testimonies of 240 people, among them 80 survivors of work camps known as "kwanliso".
Among the documented crimes against humanity are "extermination, murder, slavery, disappearances, summary executions, torture, sexual violence, forced abortions, food deprivation, forced displacement of populations, and persecutions for political, religious or gender reasons", the report stated.
The report reveals that between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are currently imprisoned in four big "kwanliso" where they are deprived of food as a form of control and punishment, and subjected to forced labour.
Micheal Kirby has, on various occasions, made appeals to take the case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) even though China, which has the right of veto in the UN Security Council, said that it was not in favour of accepting the proposal.
North Korea described the UN commission's report as "concocted" to favour the interests of the US and said that it has been based on the testimonies of North Korean refugees abroad "without checking the veracity of the information".
Till now, the regime led by the Kim dynasty has refused to open its doors to experts from the UN to evaluate the human rights situation in the country.