North Korea: Freedom of Religion or Belief

Introduction

“There can be few places in the world where the human rights situation is more egregious and yet more overlooked than North Korea.”

Professor William Schabas and Sir Geoffrey Nice, QC1

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), otherwise known as North Korea, has undoubtedly one of the worst human rights records in the world. North Korea is regarded as the world’s most closed nation, ruled by a dictatorship that is a dynasty that portrays itself as a deity. A UN Commission of Inquiry into North Korea’s human rights situation, established in 2013 by the UN Human Rights Council, concluded in its report published on 17 February 2014 that “the gravity, scale and nature” of the violations of human rights in North Korea “reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world”. The 400-page report by the Commission of Inquiry details crimes against humanity including “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation”. It concludes that such crimes against humanity are continuing “because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place”.

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