Today, we believe that basic human rights have been denied to
the people and all the imaginable atrocities known to humankind
have been exhausted in prison camps and all prisons in North
Korea behind their closed doors. We are convinced by the preponderance
of the latest information that the most abominable and horrifying
human rights violations, worse than those of Nazi concentration
camps, Soviet gulags, or any others, have been perpetuated in
North Korea for decades, massively and systematically.
Today, there are over 11,000 North Korean defectors in South
Korea, a tremendous source of fresh information from inside the
isolated country. Simultaneously, a great amount of information
about crimes against humanity in North Korea has become available
in the form of testimonies, news media reports, academic studies,
conference papers, and reports by governments and human rights
institutes worldwide.
However, such information has been widely scattered and has
often failed to receive due attention, making it almost impossible
to gain comprehensive knowledge about the crimes taking place
in North Korea today.
This is the background of the establishment in Seoul of the
North Korea Human Rights Database Center (NKDB) in April, 2004.
It has a staff force of 8 administrators and researchers. The
objectives of the Center include producing unbiased information
regarding North Korean human rights violations in a prompt, systematic
and organized ways. Such information includes firsthand witness
accounts and testimonies from North Korean scientists, senior
army officers and government officials, members of state security
agency or police, ex-prisoners, underground Christians, students,
farmers, workers and the like.
The Center has to this date collected:
a. 2,224 testimonies through interviews
b. 181 books
c. newspaper articles and reports 1993-2006
d. weeklies and monthlies 1950-2006
e. journals of related institutes 2004-6
f. information that appeared on websites 2005-2006
However, it has encountered a series of problems, one after
another, in developing an adequate system of solution to handle
the information in an efficient database system. Nevertheless,
NKDB has published its first 330-page Annual Report, the Korean
version of der Salzgiitter Report, in August 2007. The report
shows over 300 tables on all aspects of human rights violations
perpetrated in North Korea over the years. We plan to publish
2nd Report in 2008.
Today, I am most pleased to announce to you of availability
and service, on request, of database information on situations
of human rights in North Korea via:
nkdb
(at) nkdb (dot) org
tel: +82-2-723-6045 or
fax: +82-2-723-6046.
Your support will be greatly appreciated for the continuation
of the service NKDB is able to offer to researchers, professors,
journalists, human rights activists and those who are interested
in the situation of human rights in North Korea. Thank you
