Thread by @ryanstruyk

If you've never read the United Nations report from 2014 about the egregious human rights violations and crimes against humanity in North Korea, you need to read it. I'm threading some key quotes below:

"Inmates are imprisoned, usually for life, in camps without ever having been brought before a judge... They have never been charged, convicted or sentenced... [Many] are incarcerated based solely on the principle of guilt by family association. Some are even born prisoners."

"The living conditions in the political prison camps are calculated to bring about mass deaths. Forced to carry out grueling labour, inmates are provided food rations that are so insufficient that many inmates starve to death."

"The death toll is further exacerbated by executions, deaths from torture, the
denial of adequate medical care, high incidence of work accidents, lack of shelter and lack of appropriate clothes... the camps have the objective of
gradually eliminating the camp population."

"The intentional killings... through summary executions, beatings, infanticide, deliberate starvation and other illegal means, all amount to the crime of murder... The prisoners are often so weakened from malnourishment and disease that they are literally worked to death."

"Rape is regularly committed in the political prison camps of the DPRK. They are a product of the environment of the prison camps and the impunity generally enjoyed by camp officials... In other cases, women are pressed into 'consensual' sexual relations."

"The imposition of forced abortions on female inmates who become pregnant without authorization not only results in immediate physically harm, it also interferes with the victim’s reproductive rights and causes severe emotional suffering."

"Hundreds of thousands of inmates have been exterminated in political prison camps and other places over a span of more than five decades... This raises the question of whether genocide or an international crime akin to it has been committed."

"There is an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as of rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association... The State operates an all-encompassing indoctrination machine that takes root from childhood."

"During the period of famine, ideological indoctrination was used in order to
maintain the regime, at the cost of seriously aggravating hunger and starvation... It also delayed international assistance that, provided earlier, could have saved many lives."

"The commission finds that decisions, actions and omissions by the State and its leadership caused the death of at least hundreds of thousands of people and inflicted permanent physical and psychological injuries on those who survived."

"The police... systematically employ violence and punishments that amount to gross human rights violations in order to create a climate of fear that pre-empts any challenge to the current system of government... The institutions and officials involved are not held accountable."

"These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution... the forcible transfer [and] the enforced disappearance of persons and... knowingly causing prolonged starvation."

Here's where you can read the United Nations report on human rights violations in North Korea, both a 36-page summary and 372-page full report. bit.ly/2JLs4pS (fixes link)

In short, to reduce Kim Jong Un to a power-hungry dictator with nuclear weapons is inaccurate. His regime is guilty of crimes against humanity that "resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian states established during the twentieth century," according to the United Nations.