Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (Human Rights)

I am delighted to take part in this debate. I shall try to keep my remarks brief, partly because I need to leave slightly before the end, for which I apologise to all hon. Members, particularly to Front Benchers and to you, Mr. Benton. No discourtesy is intended, but I have to get a train. I understand what my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Mrs. Riordan) says, but it is fair to say that we are dealing with a particularly difficult regime that is not going to work by the normal rules of engagement, although I am always one for dialogue. Unlike hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands), I have not had the opportunity to visit North Korea. I know that a visit is planned, but sadly it seems to be at a time when I hope to be leading a delegation to Sudan, which, as the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) knows, is a passion of mine. My knowledge of North Korea may have to remain somewhat distant, although I think that I know something about the regime. I declare something of an interest, in that about two and a half years ago Christian Solidarity Worldwide asked me to go to Geneva to meet various individuals who had left North Korea. We gave evidence jointly with Olenka Frenkiel, who, as some Members may know, produced a televised report on North Korea, alleging, with a degree of certainty, that the regime uses chemical punishments, gas chambers and the like. That has never been refuted to our satisfaction. In Geneva, we gave evidence to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and it was good to see the number of people who came to talk and to listen. My right hon. Friend the Minister mentioned that 21 countries voted against the EU resolution. I do not understand how any country can vote against indicting the regime and continuing to put pressure on it until it comes into the common fold of humanity. It should deal with its own people in a more legitimate way and deal with the rest of the world in a way that allows us to begin to have a proper dialogue with it. Anyone who has been reading the papers in the past few days will know that North Korea apparently has a new missile system up and ready to go; that holds some fears for me, if not anyone else in this Chamber. I have asked a parliamentary question on what the Government are doing about that, so I shall not labour the point now, but that question needs to be answered, because we have to recognise that we are dealing with a nuclear power with increasing capacity to launch weaponry. That does not bode well for the future. Today, however, we are here to discuss human rights. As always, I draw my evidence from those who know, and those who have been there. I am particularly grateful to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, which briefed me and which was responsible for me going to Geneva, but I am also grateful to the noble Lord Alton, who has done exceptional work with his team, and who has been responsible for getting a dialogue going. It was interesting; when the all-party group was set up I, for one, thought that it would just pillory the regime and use every opportunity to draw in evidence with which to attack North Korea on whatever grounds it wanted, but to be fair, a dialogue has been started. As a result, Lord Alton and Baroness Cox have been to North Korea on a number of occasions, and in return we have had North Koreans here in Parliament, through the Inter-Parliamentary Union, to talk about parliamentary courtesies. I do not know how far we got in trying to explain our regimes to one another, but we certainly did each other the courtesy of trying to engage. Although at the most superficial level, that was engagement none the less. In the time that remains, I want simply to embellish what has already been said. Christian Solidarity Worldwide has made it clear for a long time that North Korea is the most difficult regime with which it deals. Anyone who knows anything about Christian Solidarity Worldwide will know that it goes into the most disadvantaged, dangerous and difficult parts of the world; none the less, the regime in North Korea stands out as the most difficult. Christian Solidarity Worldwide has conducted a lot of research over the years, speaking to émigrés in various countries who have escaped—I use the word ““escaped”” deliberately—from North Korea, and it continues to lobby on behalf of those who remain and, indeed, those who are threatened with the possibility of having to return because they are in China or another country that threatens to extradite them. The headlines are precisely as we have heard. The general repression and the way in which North Korean society operates are based on fear, which cows everyone other than those in the fortuitous position of being within the regime or in its pay. What has struck me when I have met people from North Korea is their eternal optimism that things will be better one day and that they will once more be part of humanity. That is what they want. Those people live in a complicated part of the world. I have also met people from South Korean, which is not ideal model of democracy. Eventually, however, the two Koreas will have to undergo some form of realignment, so that there is respect for each other’s peoples and for the democratic principles under which both should operate. North Korea still works under the cult of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. That makes things difficult, because people who go against the regime also go against the cult of the leadership. They might do that because of their religious inclinations or simply to express their human rights, but when pressure is put on them it is aimed very much at the personal level, and that is often the justification for the way in which they are treated. We have been talking, as the hon. Member for Buckingham says, about bestiality—physical mistreatment of the worst kind—but a lot of the pressure is psychological. People are made to feel that they do not belong and that the fact that they are in prison or in seclusion is entirely due to their inability to exist in the wider community. That, of course, is soul-destroying and completely unacceptable. The methods of interrogation employed are well known and brutal. People are obviously asked not only to admit guilt, but, above all, to give information. That is one reason why those who are forced back from China—I make no apology for raising this again—are often useful to the regime, which can discover the methods that they used to get out of the country in the first place and try to shut down all the escape routes. That is highly dangerous, not only for the individuals who are repatriated, but for those who might be seeking to escape. As we know, torture is readily used, and that is well documented. There is also an absence of any form of trial. Detention takes various forms. In North Korea, it may involve incarceration, but more often than not involves forcing people to what I would call hidden parts of the country, where they undertake the most physical of work and almost certainly disappear without recognition, so that we never know what has happened to them. The prisons are renowned for being overcrowded and they always operate a very strong work regime. As the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham said, the treatment of prisoners meets none of the conventions. There are forced rations and cruel treatment for those who do not behave as the regime wishes. People are pushed out of the main centres to so-called detention settlement camps, where they are kept out of mischief, so to speak, by being used in all sorts of ways including for very physical labour. As I said, human experimentation was the basis of the Olenka Frenkiel programme of about three years ago. That was frightening because there was no way for the world to bring pressure, notwithstanding my right hon. Friend the Minister’s discussions during his visits. The most alarming thing is that we are unable to do much about the issue because North Korea is such a closed society. If it was a question of exposing the practice within the country itself and getting people to take action to stop it from happening, that would be appropriate. Sadly, that is impossible, so all our evidence is second-hand, although I have met people who say that their families have been subjected to experimentation, which is justified on the basis that it is about trying to discover new medicines and new ways of using chemicals. We all know that it is about something else. Execution is commonplace in North Korea and used for all sorts of reasons. It is used as a threat, and people are held on death row for considerable periods. Execution is a very haphazard process, with the sentence sometimes being carried out years after the individual was convicted of an offence. My main concern is the lack of religious freedom. As far as I am concerned, Christians are the most vulnerable group. Just as in China Falun Gong seems to be the major opponent of the regime, for some reason the DPRK has fastened on to the notion that Christians have become the major power group opposing the regime and those who are most likely to want to replace it. There is no evidence of that; no one has been able to bring to my attention attempts by Christians to mobilise in such a way that they could even demonstrate, let alone to organise more effectively to threaten the regime. It is unclear why the Christian community is so disadvantaged, but anyone who knows anything about North Korea will be able quickly to identify all sorts of ways in which Christians have been discriminated against and worse.