The government of North Korea should stop arbitrary arrests and detentions of people working in the shadow market, as for many of them it is the only available way to make the ends meet, the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) said in a statement on Tuesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th May, 2019) The government of North Korea should stop arbitrary arrests and detentions of people working in the shadow market, as for many of them it is the only available way to make the ends meet, the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) said in a statement on Tuesday."People in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are trapped in a vicious cycle, in which the failure of the State to provide for life's basic necessities forces them to turn to rudimentary markets where they face a host of human rights violations in an uncertain legal environment," the OHCHR said.
For many North Koreans working in shadow market has become the only way to make a living or merely survive, the OHCHR said, citing its fresh report on North Korea.
Yet, as people engage in rudimentary private markets, they get summarily arrested, detained, and sometimes tortured, as the government strictly opposes any informal parallel economy, the statement continued.
"People must not be arrested, detained, prosecuted or subjected to extortion simply for trying to acquire an adequate standard of living," the OHCHR writes quoting its chief, Michelle Bachelet.
According to the report, while such arrests per se already violate human rights, they lead to even more serious human rights violations due to absence of rule of law in North Korea. Moreover, many state officials extort bribes and other favors from people desperate to avoid detention and inhumane treatment, the watchdog said.
The OHCHR has stressed that instead of crackdowns on informal market workers, North Korea should seek to either modify its dysfunctional public system or establish a functional and legal private sector - measures the UN rights watchdog deems especially important in a county where an approximate 10.9 million people (or almost half of population) are undernourished and suffer from food insecurity.
The report urges North Korea to halt prosecutions for legitimate market activities and related within-the-country travel by introducing profound changes to its criminal code and other relevant legislature.
The United Nations and its constituent agencies have repeatedly urged the international community to help North Korea currently experiencing severe food and clean water shortages.
On May 3, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the WFP published a joint report concluding that over 10 million people in North Korea, or 40 percent of the country's population, suffered from severe food shortages. The limited supply of agricultural inputs in 2018 following the worst harvest in ten years and international sanctions were listed as the causes for the shortages. The report stressed the need to provide North Korea with diversified food kits, as well as various watering and transportation equipment in order to prevent new crop failures.
