North Korea Boasts That It Has The Best System Of Human Rights – Do They Know What The Words Mean?

There is a new report out from North Korea. Their government has conducted an internal investigation and has concluded that North Korea has “the world’s most advantageous human rights system.”

The report comes in response to a scathing United Nations report in February, reports The Washington Post, which declared that North Korea has been violating human rights on a scale “without any parallel in the contemporary world.” That report accused North Korea of torture; murder; rape of its citizens; banning them from travel; conducting surveillance of its citizens; discrimination “based on supposed ideological impurities”; and banishing them to prison camps where all communication with their families and the outside world is cut off.

An earlier response by the North Korean regime attempted to discredit the findings of the UN by pointing fingers at the lifestyle of the lead researcher of the report, Michael Kirby. Kirby, the chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights in North Korea, is homosexual. According to the International Business Times, the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) declared that Kirby’s sexual orientation disqualified him from investigating human rights issues, calling it “ridiculous” for a “disgusting old lecher with a 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality” to deal with the human rights abuses of other nations. This response prompted some people to scratch their heads, wondering what one had to do with the other.

Some of the accusations in the UN report were pieced together over several years’ time, reports Vice, from the testimonies of survivors of the government camps who managed to escape. According to Catholic Online, over 100 victims testified to the Commission. Satellite imagery was analyzed. The picture that emerges is brutal. Political prisoners are reported to be treated as slaves and suffer horrendous abuse and torture under the North Korean government.

The lengthy report, 53,558 words (including the appendix), is purportedly an internal investigation by North Korea to determine whether or not there is any basis in fact for the accusations put forth by the UN.

All of the criticism is fantasy, according to the new report put out Saturday by North Korea’s Association for Human Rights Studies, the group that declares that North Korea is a bastion of human rights. The unnamed writers say that Kirby’s Commission of Inquiry is merely “a marionette of the US and its satellite forces, fabricated and circulated its ‘report’ based on ‘testimonies’ of human scum who betrayed their homeland and people.'”

North Korea’s characterization of itself is the real fantasy, according to Breitbart. The report is “a laughably false document that distorts the definition of ‘human rights’ into collectivist talking points that emphasize the need to keep Japan from invading, and make no positive mention of traditional notions of human rights at all.”

The Washington Post reports that the document is “a grueling read. The report opens by explaining the geography and history of Korea. It goes on to try to define the very notion of human rights, while also explaining that state sovereignty is a form of human rights (something the report says Koreans learned while under Japanese rule, living a ‘miserable life worse than a dog of a family having funeral’).”

The report boasts a litany of freedoms for the people of North Korea, which would be wonderful if they were reality. But actions speak louder than words.

Earlier this week, The Inquisitr reported that an American citizen, 24-year-old Matthew Miller, has been sentenced to six years in a North Korean labor camp. It remains unclear what his crime was. The state media of North Korea has accused Miller of “espionage,” of deliberately planning to get arrested so that he can personally witness human rights violations in the prisons, reports CNN.

There are two other Americans being held in North Korean prisons, Dr. Kenneth Bae, a Christian missionary, serving a sentence of 15 years of hard labor “on charges of trying to use religion to overthrow its political system,” and Jeffrey Fowle, who allegedly left a Bible in a bathroom at his hotel, while vacationing in the Hermit Kingdom.

If even these three cases are any indication of the state of freedom and human rights in North Korea, it is apparent that the dictatorship has a completely different understanding than the rest of the world of what it means to be “the world’s most advantageous human rights system.” Try again, Kim Jong-un.

[images via Reuters and Chosun Media]