Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. In 2009, I organised an international conference on human rights in North Korea. It took place at the Hyatt hotel in Melbourne. It was opened by the then Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade. I hope it helped the change in the international atmosphere that has taken place on attitudes to the gross abuse of human rights in North Korea. In my view, it is the worst human rights situation in the world. That is a big call, but the number of concentration camps and the hundreds of thousands of people who incarcerated in them and the general terror under which people in North Korea live make it worthy of that description.

I welcome Judge Kirby's important inquiry. I cannot speak highly enough of his conduct in this inquiry. It is amazing—which is a bit of an understatement—that the Security Council passed a resolution based on his inquiry, given the automatic majorities that take place at the Security Council. It just shows the level of detail and the hard work that a person of his standing was able to bring, in almost impossible circumstances, to the UN Security Council to actually get it to pass a resolution at the Security Council level on human rights.

My opposition to the Gulag-style system of North Korea's concentration camps has been long standing. I have spoken on this since I became a member of parliament in 1998. In 2009, I hosted in conjunction with the South Korean organisation, Citizens' Alliance, a great organisation which supports North Korean refugees coming to South Korea, the ninth international conference on human rights in North Korea—a phenomenon which I think is partially responsible for this very important change in world attitudes to the gross abuses of human rights in North Korea—. It was a bit of an ambitious project for an individual member of parliament; nonetheless, we pulled it off. It was the first of these international conferences opened by a foreign minister and was attended by 250 domestic and international delegates, including government officials, human rights activists and the previous special rapporteur of the UN on human rights in North Korea.

The conference was marked by pessimism and frustration. We discussed how North Korea continues to demand and receive large amounts of aid as a price for its behaviour in the nuclear stakes and its brinkmanship on the Korean peninsula, but that did not seem to improve its behaviour with regard to its own citizens. Six years have passed since the conference, and there is, at least, a changed international atmosphere about the internal situation in North Korea. That is a very good thing and a positive development, because it did not happen before then. The situation on the ground is probably as bad as ever, but at least people outside around the world, particularly in Asia, have focused on this terrible persecution.

We heard shocking stories of the plight of North Korea's people who are starved, regimented, deprived of the most basic rights, trapped in an Orwellian nightmare of lies and propaganda and cut off from the outside world. I think there are close to 300,000 people languishing in these labour camps. Some of them are incarcerated by generations, so that if a grandson is arrested then the whole family, including the grandparents' generation, is arrested. If the grandparent is arrested, the children and grandchildren are forced into these gulags.

It is 2015, and what has changed? In the 3½ decades since Deng Xiaoping's reforms in China, at least China has a partial market economy and has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It is 25 years since the first free elections in Poland, which marked the end of European communism, yet the world still confronts the dilemma of what to do with 25 million people in North Korea, the last relic of high Stalinism from the era of the Cold War. Only in North Korea is there this deadly combination of a totally repressive political system and an unworkable economic regime still in place.

As this motion recalls, the 372 page Report of the commission of inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, chaired by former Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby, has been released. According to Kirby, the purpose of the report was to ensure that we cannot say, 'We didn't know.' This parliament has just debated a resolution on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. One of the terrible things about the genocide of the Second World War was that people claimed that they did not know that it was happening. When I ran this conference in 2009 that was one of the driving impetuses for it. I was very proud to publish and you can still see the reports of the conference on my website. It is the first time ever that a map was published of all of the concentration camps in North Korea. Justice Kirby distilled that essential point of it: people cannot say that they do not know with North Korea. We know where these people are. We know the circumstances under which they are existing. We know where these camps are. We know the names of them. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

This unrivalled and damning report—

by Justice Kirby—

a year in the making, has presented evidence of countless abuses by the North Korean government and military that shocked the conscience of humanity …

Justice Kirby's report states:

These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.

What an indictment. Kirby's panel recommended the situation in North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court; but, with North Korea's ally holding veto power over the Security Council, this is unlikely to happen. However, it was refreshing, as I said, that the Security Council adopted the mass human rights abuses of North Korean as a standing agenda item.

I ask: where are the demonstrators? Where are the people who exhibit such conscience in other areas on this issue of North Korea? Surely, when Justice Kirby released his report they should have been in the streets. When the report was released last year, Justice Kirby hoped that it would refresh dialogue on the atrocities committed in North Korea. The problem is that I do not think it has. People have tut-tutted but not enough has changed. The reality is that no amount of persuasion or bribery will induce Kim Jong-un to moderate his regime, because he and the army and secret police apparatus which he depends on care only about holding onto their power and wealth.

The continued existence of this regime in North Korea confronts all people of good will with a terrible dilemma. If we cut this country off from all aid in the hope that it will bring about the downfall of the regime it will increase the suffering of the people. If, on the other hand, the world engages with North Korea and increases its aid, the regime will, as it has always done, use it to feed the party and military elite and starve the people. This is indeed a terrible dilemma but some decisions can be made that will help quicken the inevitable collapse of this repugnant regime.

First, there needs to be increased pressure on China over its treatment of North Korean defectors, particularly those people who travel to the Chinese-North Korean border. The UNHCR should be given access to the border region so that these people can act under some kind of protection.

Second, we must create every opportunity for North Koreans to engage with the outside world. This will help them see that the paradise which their regime tells them they live in is an Orwellian falsehood. Whether North Koreans come here as students, diplomats or most recently, as the previous speaker mentioned, as sportspeople when Australia hosted the Asian Cup, every North Korean who is exposed to the outside world can become an agent of change when they go home.

Third, the Australian government needs to introduce laws making it illegal for any Australian citizen to be involved in business dealings with the North Korean government. It was dismaying to see a report in August last year that a private equity firm, SRE Minerals, signed a joint venture with the North Korean regime's Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation to develop a mining operation. This kind of venture can only assist in maintaining North Korea's iron-fisted control over its population. The Pyongyang regime needs hard currency and it is clear that these and other projects that I have not mentioned could provide billions of dollars to North Korea and help keep the North Korean leadership in power.

To people around the world Kim Jong-un may be a figure of fun, with his high-style haircuts. His father was a figure of fun in that memorable animated film titled Team America:World Police. But these people are not really just a joke; they are not just something comic for us to laugh at. The people of North Korea have suffered decades-long oppression. When you meet North Korean people, as I am sure the member who spoke previously has, you can see that they are a foot shorter than South Korean people as a result of the starvation and deprivation that they have faced. Theirs is a terrible situation. Honour to Justice Kirby on his report. Honour to the parliament for raising this topic.

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