Robert Park

At the 2005 UN World Summit, the largest gathering of heads of state in history made a landmark commitment to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and pledged to intervene when a given state manifestly failed to protect its population from mass atrocity or was the actual perpetrator of these crimes. It is unequivocal that the DPRK has violated this international norm known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). With hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees outside of the country, evidence of crimes against humanity and genocide taking place in North Korea is overwhelming. The DPRK is actively targeting for destruction every group which is protected under the UN Genocide Convention through its policy of killing the half-Chinese children of North Korean women forcibly repatriated by China (genocide on national, ethnical, and racial grounds) and through its systematic annihilation of its indigenous religious population and their families (genocide on religious grounds). The North Korean state is perpetrating crimes against humanity as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court through its treatment of political prisoners and its exploitative and discriminatory food policy which has been the primary cause of millions of deaths.