GOP rep says US must focus on North Korea abuses ahead of UN council

The United Nations Human Rights Council is preparing for its fourth universal periodic review of North Korea in November. The council will gather information from member countries to compile a comprehensive profile of human rights abuses occurring in the hermit nation.

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Republican Steel, who was born in South Korea, filed a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday outlining key concerns of herself and the large contingent of Korean immigrants in her district.

Among the concerns listed is the forced repatriation of escaped North Korean refugees, as well as the past abductions of Japanese, South Korean, and other foreign nationals by the North Korean government.

The abduction of foreign nationals by North Korea has been widely documented in the decades since the Korean War, most prominently from the border cities of South Korea and the coastal regions of Japan. Those individuals, most of them kept in the country for decades, have been almost entirely lost in the opacity of North Korean society.

Additionally, in recent years, China has adopted a policy to cooperate with the North Korean regime to return escaped North Korean nationals when caught attempting to flee through its territory.

The situation amounts to something of a prison state — those inside have difficulty escaping while many outsiders have been silently smuggled within and held in isolation for the majority of their lives.

China and Russia have benefitted immensely from the control exerted by the North Korean government, Steel points out in the letter. The two regional allies regularly import North Koreans for labor in defiance of long-established U.N. resolutions.

Steel urged Blinken in the letter to make clear that supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s regime has failed to abide by previously agreed-upon improvements to its human rights conditions, such as discontinuing the use of torture.

The California lawmaker told the Washington Examiner that these issues are particularly close to her as a South Korean immigrant born to two escapees from the North. Her parents met in a refugee camp after each escaped over the border individually.

“Decades after my parents fled following a communist takeover, North Korea’s government continues to abuse basic human rights and aggressively persecute its own citizens,” said Steel.

She continued, “Innocent North Koreans, defectors, and detained foreign citizens need the United States’s help now more than ever.”

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North Korea’s delinquency on the international stage has taken on new urgency as the United States, South Korea, and the United Nations have confirmed there is evidence that North Korean troops are going to be deployed to aid Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.

Thousands of military personnel have been documented moving via ships from Pyongyang to the Russian port city of Vladivostok. They are expected to join the combat taking place in the Kursk region of Russia currently held by Ukrainian forces.