Vitit Muntarbhorn’s (picture on the left) report is to be examined at the UN Human Rights Council on 15 March. “The United Nations must act to protect North Koreans from military rulers who are committing “harrowing and horrific” human rights violations,” told Vitit Muntarbhorn to Reuters on 12 March.

Burma and North Korea on focus
The Rafto (1993) and Nobel Peace Prize (1996) laureate, José Ramos-Horta, the President of East-Timor, gave a statement at the UN Human Rights Council on 11 March in connection with the Council’s interactive dialogue with Special Rapporteurs on human rights defenders and on freedom of religion or belief.

“Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Korea stood out in Asia and indeed in the world among the gravest human rights crises. While the international community was transfixed by the Democratic Republic of Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship, there had been less attention paid to the horrific gulag that imprisoned an entire nation and condemned it to extreme deprivation,” stated President Ramos-Horta (picture on the right).

Why Rafto engagement in North Korea?
Kim Dae-jung (1925-2009), a former president of South Korea, was awarded the Rafto Prize in 2000, and the same year also the Nobel Peace Prize, in honour of his “sunshine” policy towards North Korea and in recognition of his life long struggle for human rights in The Republic of Korea.

The Rafto Foundation has been involved in issues concerning the human rights situation in North Korea since 1999, when member of the board, Mr. Jan Ramstad, interviewed several North Korean defectors. This left him with ever-lasting impressions and a burning commitment to spread awareness in Norway and internationally about the incredible hardships the people of North Korea are enduring.

This commitment was put into action; Rafto started to build a network with relevant NGOs from Asia and the US, and an initiative was undertaken to produce a series of documentaries, focusing on human rights abuses in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, such as North Korea, the People´s Republic of China and Belarus.

Yodok – the world’s largest political prison camp
Yodok Stories (2008) is a shocking documentary film about one of North Korea’s darkest secrets: the political prison camps. Today, more than 200,000 men, women and children are locked up in North Korea’s concentration camps. Inmates face systematic torture, starvation and murder and very few survive the atrocities.

The film’s protagonist is a film director from North Korea who has managed to escape and now lives in South Korea. A small number of people have managed to flee the camps and start a new life in South Korea. Yodok shows how some of them meet and decide to make an extraordinary and controversial musical about their experiences in the Yodok concentration camp. For the refugees, this raises the possibility to talk about their experiences and inspires others to protest against the existence of such camps.

To see a trailer for the film and other information, please visit http://www.yodokfilm.com/ or the website of the production company, Piraya Film – www.piraya.no

How does the world’s most totalitarian state work?
Yodok Stories gives a broad presentation of how a totalitarian state like North Korea works. We gain an insight into a collectivist thought process which has gruesome consequences for the country’s economy, culture and judicial system. North Korea is a state that throws its own citizens into political prison camps when they are forced to flee from starvation, which the state is itself entirely responsible for.

At the same time, contact between North Korea and the rest of the world is so limited, and the relationship with the rest of the world so tense, that there is little awareness in the outside world of the suffering the average North Korean endures. Yodok Stories is also a film that raises the question of what responsibility we have for doing something about what we think is unacceptable.

North Korea – new approaches
Rafto hosted the 7th international conference on North Korean human rights and refugees in Bergen in May 2006. The conference was organised in cooperation with the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. Rafto has developed a broad international network on North Korea, both academically and with regard to human rights monitoring and advocacy.

The UN envoy to North Korea, Vitit Muntarbhorn, gave a keynote speech about the human rights situation in North Korea. Mr. Muntarbhorn is a law professor from Thailand. In 2004, he was appointed as Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in North Korea. In this work he has had a difficult task, as he has been denied access to the country.

In January 2008, the Rafto Foundation co-organised the 8th international conference on North Korean human rights, held at Chatham House in London.

The Rafto Foundation is a non-profit and non-partisan organisation dedicated to the global promotion of human rights. The Rafto Foundation was established in the humanistic tradition of the Helsinki Accord. Foundation aims to promote the three fundamental human rights of intellectual, political and economic freedom.