Anna Lee Stangl, Head of Advocacy, remembers CSWs first visit to the North Korea border. Decades later, we haven’t stopped calling for change.

It was September 2000. It was cool and the leaves were starting to fall in Jilin Province, China. We sat low in the back seat of a car – hats pulled down to obscure our faces – as the vehicle wound up through forested roads.

Eventually, the driver pulled off the main road and we bumped along over dirt and gravel for another forty minutes or so, finally arriving at a little cabin, all on its own. It seemed an idyllic place, a refuge. And for the four people awaiting us inside, that’s exactly what it was.

Over the next few hours, we sat on the floor of the cabin as two women and two men – all North Korean refugees in hiding – told us their stories.

We heard from one young woman, tall and slim, of how she had dedicated her life to the military and adored the ruling Kim family, until the famine led her to cross the border. It was meant to be a temporary visit – she would find food and money and bring it back – but instead she found a new faith in Christ, supplanting her devotion to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and making it impossible for her to return home. 

We heard from another young woman, with long hair and round, rosy cheeks, who had also made it across the border, in the hopes of leaving North Korea forever – only to be intercepted by a trafficker and sold as a ‘wife’ to a man three times her age. She was held, essentially, as a slave, until our hosts were able to extract her and bring her to temporary safety at the cabin.

Then there were the two young men, who were very small. They looked as if they were barely in their teens, due to severe malnutrition they had suffered through their childhood. They were both orphans from the countryside and saw no future for themselves in North Korea.

 All four were waiting in the cabin until our hosts could find a safe route for them to leave China, which, to this day, returns all refugees back to North Korea despite the severe punishments they are likely to face.

 Christians in a nightmarish context

 This was CSW’s first very assignment to the China and North Korea border.

We would go next to Seoul where we’d meet more refugees (now living in relative safety in South Korea), and Korean human rights organisations documenting and reporting on horrific – almost unbelievable – human rights atrocities occurring on a mass scale inside North Korea.

Within that nightmarish context, we learned that North Koreans discovered to be Christians, and their families to the third generation were singled out for some of the worst treatment, as the Kim dynasty attempted to eradicate any trace of Christianity in North Korea. The visit set in place the foundation of CSW’s work in the decades to come, drawing the world’s attention to the human rights atrocities taking place in North Korea and calling for international action. 

A call to action

In 2007, CSW published ‘A Case to Answer, A Call to Act’ – a landmark report setting out the case for the recognition of violations amounting to crimes against humanity in North Korea. The report called for an urgent response to address these violations and urged the United Nations to establish a Commission of Inquiry (COI) on North Korea. 

 In September 2011, CSW helped to create the International Coalition to Stop Crimes against Humanity in North Korea (ICNK), which brought together over 40 human rights organisations from across the world, joining in the call for the COI. 

All of this contributed, finally, to the 2013 establishment and mandating of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).

 ‘No parallel in the world’

In 2014, the COI published what is considered to be the most comprehensive report into human rights violations in North Korea. The report’s findings and recommendations were extensive, concluding 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’. In the ten years since the publication of the COI report, the situation in North Korea has, tragically, not improved in any measurable way when it comes to human rights – and CSW has not stopped calling for change.

Now, we have launched a major new report: ‘We cannot look away’. The report exposes the continuing crimes against humanity in North Korea, and calls on the international community to take action by ensuring the human rights situation is regularly discussed alongside the nuclear issue and to fully implement the 2014 COI recommendations.

24 years have passed, and I have not forgotten the faces or stories of the young women and young men I met that September afternoon. I pray for them and for the millions of other North Koreans, in and outside the country, who deserve to live out their lives in freedom, free from fear.

CSW will not be silent until they are.

Read ‘We cannot look away’ at csw.org.uk/NorthKoreaReport2024