UN names Australian to head NKorea probe

May 7th, 2013

Peter Nolan

The UN Human Rights Council has named Australian former judge Michael Kirby to steer a landmark probe of abuses in North Korea, which refuses to co-operate with the world body’s investigators.

The council on Tuesday said Kirby would lead a three-member team whose mandate was set down at a March session of the United Nations’ top human rights forum.

Kirby sat on Australia’s High Court from 1996 to 2009, and served previously as president of the International Commission of Jurists, UN special representative for Cambodia and a member of the World Health Organization’s Global Commission on AIDS.

The team’s other members are Serbian human rights campaigner Sonja Biserko, an expert on war crimes, and Marzuki Darusman, an Indonesian former attorney general who since 2010 has been monitoring North Korea for the council.

The commission’s stated goal to probe “systematic, widespread and grave violations”, with the aim of “ensuring full accountability, in particular for violations which may amount to crimes against humanity”.

The council set up the commission – similar to one in place for the Syria conflict – after Darusman presented a report accusing North Korea of a string of violations including torture, arbitrary detention and depriving the population of food.

He also highlighted concerns about a network of political prison camps believed to hold some 200,000 people, including detainees who were born in captivity because entire families are thought to have been sent there.

North Korea, run by a Stalinist regime since the end of World War II, is one of the most isolated nations on the planet.

It has refused to let UN rights monitors visit, leading them to rely largely on testimony from North Koreans who have fled the country.

In recent years, it has locked horns with the international community over its nuclear program, and military tensions on the Korean peninsula have escalated dramatically since the North conducted its third nuclear test earlier this year.