From AFP:North Korea's regime has targeted women in a crackdown on private markets, depriving families of a vital source of food and income at a time of growing food shortages, a UN human rights rapporteur said Monday.
Vitit Muntarbhorn, who last week denounced human rights conditions in North Korea as "abysmal" in a scathing report to the UN General Assembly, said the plight of women "has gotten worse and worse during these years."
He said women under the age of 49 have been prohibited from engaging in trading, and the regime has gone so far as to ban them from wearing pants or riding bicycles to make it more difficult for them to engage in marketing activities.
Reports of clashes between young women and authorities have surfaced, reflecting tensions over the policy as food shortages deepen with a decline in international food aid, he said.
From the Times of India:
North Korean women face hard labor if caught wearing trousers rather than skirts, under the communist regime’s latest crackdown on public morals, South Korean activists said on Friday.
Offenders can be punished with hours of forced labor or fines of 700 won, almost a week’s salary for the average worker, human rights group Good Friends said, citing its own sources within the isolated nation.
The Stalinist leadership’s campaign is angering women who see skirts as less practical than trousers, Good Friends director Lee Seung-Yong said.
From the Seattle Times:
For North Korean women who run off to China, rules are rigged on both sides of the border.
North Korea regards them as criminals for leaving. China refuses to recognize them as refugees, sending many back to face interrogation, hard labor and sometimes torture. Others stay on in stateless limbo, sold by brokers to Chinese men in need of fertile women and live-in labor.
The home-and-abroad abuse of North Korean women who seek sanctuary in China was a story U.S. TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were sentenced Monday to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp, were working on when they were detained in the border area. The circumstances of their arrest remain unclear, though a North Korean court convicted them of entering the country illegally.
Mass flight from North Korea dates to the mid-1990s, when hundreds of thousands of North Koreans fled a famine that killed perhaps a million people. But a recent human-rights report, based on interviews in China with 77 female defectors, details how their insecurity and statelessness can continue inside China as the price of escaping the North.
Forced marriage, abiding threats of deportation and a life without citizenship have become the norm for most female defectors living in China, according to "Lives for Sale," based on the research of Lee Hae-young, a Seoul-based human-rights researcher. Her work was paid for and published by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a nonprofit group based in Washington.
