In 2017, the Walk Free Foundation partnered with researchers at the Leiden Asia Centre and the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) in an effort to learn more about the hidden reality regarding forced labour and other forms of modern slavery inside North Korea. As it is not possible to directly survey or otherwise collect data within North Korea, the research involved undertaking interviews with 50 defectors from North Korea who are living in South Korea.
Of the 50 people interviewed, all but one described situations they had been subjected to while living in North Korea that meet the international legal definition of “forced labour.” In this sample, three key typologies of modern slavery emerged. First, repeated mobilisation by the government of children, and later adults, through mandatory, unpaid “communal labour” in agriculture, road building, and construction.
For children, this might involve daily work in agriculture, or a month of work at harvest time. The schools, and not the children, received payment for the work. If children did not participate, they would later be punished and criticised within the school itself. Participation could be avoided through paying bribes.
For adults, communal labour involved being mobilised for “battles” in which workers are sent to work for 70 or 100 days in a row. The penalty for refusal is a cut in food rations or the assessment of taxes.
ANSWER THE QUESTIONS:
What is one way to do survey to get insights of North Korea?
What was the common answer of all people who were interviewed?
What is the condition of children in North Korea?
What is the condition of adult of North Korea?
Give one value judgement from source 2 about the practices of North Korea.
Answers
North Korea has the highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world, with 1 out of every 10 citizens considered victims, according to estimates included in a new report.
More than 2.6 million people live under slavery in the country, the vast majority of them forced to work by the state, the 2018 Global Slavery Index found. The report also said that North Korea's government had the weakest response to slavery out of all the countries surveyed, as the North Korean state itself is involved in forced labor both inside and outside the country.
The report defines modern-day slavery to include human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, forced or servile marriage, and the sale and exploitation of children, as well as slavery itself.
The findings come amid ongoing negotiations between North Korea and the United States and concurrent inter-Korean talks with South Korea. These talks have focused on denuclearization and military issues rather than human rights issues such as slavery.
“There's a strong focus on bombs and missiles, but the North Korean tragedy is much more about lost freedom through the brutal suppression of human potential,” said Andrew Forrest, founder of the Walk Free Foundation.
North Korean overseas workers have subsidized the Kim regime and its nuclear program for years. But new U.N. sanctions directly target the worker program. (Jason Aldag, Joyce Lee/The Washington Post)
Under the leadership of Forrest, an Australian mining magnate turned anti-slavery campaigner, Walk Free has published the Global Slavery Index since 2013. The index aims to estimate the number of slaves in a country, rather than just count reported cases. The organization argues that the illicit and generally secret practice is more widespread than records show.
In the past, some experts, such as human trafficking scholar Anne Gallagher, have criticized the methodology of Walk Free's estimates, though the organization has revised its process a number of times in response to criticism. In September, it joined the U.N.-affiliated International Labor Organization to release a report that estimated that 40.3 million people were in some form of modern slavery around the world on any given day last year.
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For this year's index, Walk Free teamed up with Leiden Asia Center and the Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) in a bid to reach accurate estimates for North Korea, arguably the most secretive nation on Earth.
Researchers conducted interviews with 50 North Korean defectors, all but one of whom said they had been subjected to conditions that met the international legal definition of “forced labor,” according to the index.
“While the information vacuum poses challenges, we are confident that the data reflects the most accurate estimation on the pervasiveness of modern-day slavery inside North Korea,” said Fiona David, Walk Free's executive director of global research. She noted that the research also involved looking at a variety of preexisting data from international organizations and nonprofits.
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Amanda Mortwedt Oh of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, an organization not affiliated with the research, said she was curious about why the 2018 estimate was more than double a 2016 Global Slavery Index estimate. However, she did not dispute the core findings.
“North Korea is essentially a slave state that uses its own citizens for the Kim regime's benefit,” Mortwedt Oh said, referring to the government led by Kim Jong Un and his father and grandfather before him.
In 2014, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea released a report that concluded that North Korea “does not have any parallel in the contemporary world” because of the scale of its human rights violations. The report highlighted North Korea's political prison camp system: Recent estimates have suggested that as many as 130,000 people were being held in four camps for alleged “political crimes.”
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North Korea recently announced an amnesty from Aug. 1 for people “convicted of the crimes against the country and people,” to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the country. Human rights groups have cautioned that such announcements have been made in previous years and that it was not clear whether a significant number of people would be released.
Forrest said the slavery data showed the need for international pressure.
“The implementation of mass forced-labor programs, and the sheer scale of modern slavery within North Korea, is the regime's biggest crime,” he said. “Internationally, both in the U.S., Europe and beyond, we need to put this issue front and center of all discussions with Kim Jong Un, and demand immediate freedom as part of any diplomacy or cooperation with North Korea.”