100 days: Family has no word on Canadian pastor held in North Korea
May 15th was 100th day since the Rev. Hyeon Soo Lim, a Canadian citizen, was detained in North Korea while he was on a humanitarian trip.
For 100 days, his family has not heard of any update on his condition or what North Korea has charged him with.
"The family is very much aware all this time has passed and they continue to ask the community for prayers," said Lisa Pak, a leader at the church led by Lim, who spoke on the behalf of Lim’s family.
Lim traveled to North Korea from China on January 30 to aid projects established by his church in the northeastern city of Rajin, including an orphanage, a nursery and a nursing home. Pak said it was a "routine" trip that the pastor had more than 100 time.
The Canadian government first acknowledged his status with a statement in March.
Over two months later, Lim's country of citizenship has not changed its answer:
"We are aware of a Canadian citizen detained in North Korea," Caitlin Workman, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, said on Friday. "Consular officials are in contact with family members and are providing assistance to them. I'm afraid that for privacy reasons, we are not able to comment further."
The Lim family still does not know the reason of his arrest. "We don't believe that [proselytizing] is the way he would have behaved. He's very wise about that," Pak said about Lim. "He knows the language, he knows the nature of the government, so we don't see that as a legitimate reason that he would be detained."
"North Korea has a very strict and very extensive penal code," said Jean Lee, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. According to Lee, most foreign detainees in the country are accused of crimes against the state, which are extraterritorial. In other word, they can be prosecutable in North Korea even if they were committed outside of the state.
"It's only been recently that they've had the ability to really track what we do outside the country," said Lee, who is also a former Associated Press bureau chief in Pyongyang. "The last couple years they've gotten much better at using the Internet to keep track of the people that they interact with."
[source: CNN]
