The Korean Workers’ Party is 75 years old – and that’s nothing to celebrate
By John Choi and Benedict Rogers
There are several regimes in the world today that would compete for that ignominious title, but few that come close to the absolute totalitarianism of Kim Jong-un’s North Korean regime. In many dictatorships there are grave violations of human rights, but some flicker of light and space, no matter how slim, that – often despite the regime’s efforts at repression – enables courageous human rights defenders, religious leaders and civil society activists to dissent. In North Korea, there simply is none. Every article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is violated or denied, every day.
Even the name of the regime founded 75 years ago today is an Orwellian parody. The Korean Workers’ Party not only subjects hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in North Korea’s prison camps to forced labour, it consigns many North Korean workers to slave labour conditions abroad too. It has presided over a system that has resulted in the trafficking of North Korean women into sexual slavery in China. It has caused the starvation of millions, and led to thousands of North Koreans fleeing the country to escape the regime’s oppression. .........
