
Many female North Korean refugees suffer violence or human trafficking after fleeing their homeland, a watchdog has said
If you are a North Korean, you would be in a dire need of protection of your human rights under the government’s oppression. If you are a North Korean and woman, you would know that wherever you go, the protection of your rights would be barely possible.
Even once a few of those North Koreans successfully flee their own country, they face the similar, if not worse, oppressions and human rights infringements. The following recently-reported article sheds light upon this situation of female refugees in China and how they live in a sickening fear until they find a safe haven.
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The report by the National Human Rights Commission was its first on the plight of women refugees in third countries and followed interviews and a survey of 274 defectors last year.
“Border areas are where most of the human rights infringements against women take place,” university professor Lee Im-Ha, who helped conduct the survey, told a press conference.
Virtually all North Koreans fleeing their country cross into China, where they face forced repatriation if caught. Many travel on to Southeast Asian nations in the hope of eventual resettlement in South Korea.
Many suffered abuses at refugee camps in China and other countries, the survey found. Almost 20 percent of the women bribed North Korean guards with money or sex to get across the initial border, it said.
China’s forced repatriation policy has been strongly criticised by rights groups.
At a Washington press conference in April last year, North Korean women who escaped the sex trade in China said brokers there treated them like livestock by selling them to one or more “husbands”.
Almost 17,000 North Koreans have arrived in the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.




