Fiona Bruce MP hosts packed meeting in Parliament to highlight the plight of North Koreans
There was standing room only as over 30 MPs gathered at a meeting hosted by Congleton Constituency’s MP, Fiona Bruce, in conjunction with charity Open Doors, to hear moving testimony about the plight in North Korea.
Fiona Bruce is Vice Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea and has been a strong advocate for the plights of North Koreans who experience persecution, imprisonment and torture under the dictatorial regime. She said following the meeting:
“I was so pleased that such a large number of MPs attended the meeting. The suffering of many North Koreans is truly horrific and we need to address, as a Government and a country, what we can do to help those in what is clearly a desperate need. The voice in Parliament on behalf of the persecuted North Korean people is getting louder and I am tremendously encouraged that there is a groundswell of support building for a BBC Korean World Service for which I have been campaigning. I shall continue to press both the BBC and the Government for this. We need to let the people of North Korea know that they are far from forgotten.”
"We cannot stay silent, North Korea is in breach of virtually every single element of the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights."
Hea Woo, a North Korean refugee, gave a graphic and powerful account at the meeting of her time inside a North Korean labour camp - where torture and beatings are routine and arbitrary executions frequent. She said:
"Sometimes we had soup with nothing in it, just full of dirt...In some places whole families were put into camps. They separated the men from the women...the guards told us that we are not human beings, we are just prisoners, so we don't have any right to love...Even if people died there, they didn't let the family members outside know. "
MPs were given the opportunity to ask questions and discussed how the international community should address the issue.
After the meeting Fiona Bruce filed an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons which reads as below and refers to the UN Commission of Inquiry which the All Party Group pressed for and which has just reported. In it Mr Justice Kirby, Convenor of the Commission of Inquiry reports on evidence from North Korean refuges from around the world, that the human rights atrocities in North Korea are without parallel.
Fiona Bruce MP said, “Now that we have this Report, the whole world knows of the human rights atrocities in concentrations camps containing hundreds of thousands of North Koreans, even as we speak, being treated worse than we would treat animals, the world must not stay silent. The leadership in North Korea must be called to account.”
The EDM reads:-
That this House welcomes and fully endorses the findings and recommendations of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry into human rights violations in North Korea; calls on the Government to lead the international community in implementing the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry, including seeking a referral of a case to the International Criminal Court (ICC); urges the Government to work within the UN to renew, strengthen and expand the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, including increasing resources in support of the Special Rapporteur's work, in order to strengthen a continuing mechanism for monitoring, investigation and reporting; further calls on the Government to work with others in the UN to establish a database for evidence with a view to future justice and accountability; and further urges the Government to actively consider every possible mechanism for accountability, including the establishment of an ad hoc tribunal, if a referral to the ICC is not achieved.
