5. North Korea
Points:5
Areas of human rights violation as identified by HRW: freedom of movement; freedom of information; labor rights; political prisoner camps; forced labor.
Endless list of human rights violations
All countries on the list 11 worst Asian countries for human rights violation are ruled by the authoritarian regimes, but the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Un seems unprecedented.
UN report on human rights in North Korea from 2014 said that violations “reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world”. The list of human rights abuses is endless and goes from complete restriction on freedom of thought, information, association and religion across state surveillance to “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation”.
Torture
Torture is an integral part of interrogation process in country’s prisons. Many arrested people are held behind bars without trial for an arbitrary period of time. Starvation and forced labor are commonplace. However, abuses in ordinary jails do not amount to cruelty in political prison camps. It is estimated that there are between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners, which is the decrease compared to previous years. However, the drop down is mainly due to prisoners’ deaths as the government carries out systematic elimination “through deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide”. Deliberate starvation is not only present in penal institutions. According to UN report the government has used food as a mean to control population, thus causing deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of people.
Media freedom
North Korea is a second-worst state in the world in regards to press freedom. The country, in which all media operate under strict state’s control, and where citizens have limited access to Internet and phone cells, resembles George Orwell’s visions in Big Brother. Media workers are often targets of arbitrary prosecutions and imprisonment.
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