[USFK Forums] 320 NK Refugees Live in Europe [Korea Times]

[C. Y. Lee]

Uploaded by C. Y. Lee on Friday, March 10, 2006

320 NK Refugees Live in Europe

The Korea Times, Thursday, March 9, 2006
By Park Song-wu
Staff Reporter

A total of 320 North Koreans have secured asylum status in five Western European states, with most of them finding their new homes in Germany, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Thursday.

As of December 2004, Germany issued refugee status to 276 North Koreans; Britain 17; the Netherlands 15; Denmark seven; and Ireland five, the American broadcaster said.

The report quoted a recently announced statistic from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

``There was no known case of European countries giving asylum status to North Koreans from 1995 to 1999,'' the RFA said, ``but the Netherlands blazed a trail in 2001 and others followed in the footsteps the next year.''

In 2001, the Netherlands first granted refugee status to seven North Koreans. Meanwhile, North Korea's human rights record remains ``extremely'' poor and the regime continued to commit numerous serious abuses, said a U.S. report released by the State Department on Wednesday.

``The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a dictatorship under the absolute rule of Kim Jong-il, general secretary of the Korean Workers' Party,'' the annual human rights report said, referring to North Korea's official name.

The regime exercised rigid control over many aspects of citizens' lives, the report said, citing extra-judicial killings, torture, forced abortion, lack of fair trials and denial of freedom of speech and assembly, as examples of the Pyongyang regime's oppression of human rights.

The State Department is congressionally mandated to annually issue the report, which reviews the human rights records of nearly 200 countries around the world.

North Korea was among seven countries, including China, Iran, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Belarus, that deprived or severely restricted citizens of basic rights, according to the report.

The first country to fire back at the U.S. report was China, the Associated Press reported.

A day after the report was released, China's Cabinet denounced the United States for widespread discrimination against minorities, among other things, and for American troops' brutality at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.

im@koreatimes.co.kr

03-09-2006 17:50

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