New York, March 17, 2023
Thank you, Linda, and thank you to the US Mission for co-organizing this important meeting. I am grateful to Japan and the Republic of Korea for co-sponsoring this important event.
I am grateful to Mr. Turpin and to Ms Salmon for their important account you shared today on the HR situation in North Korea.
Ms Lee, Mr Kim, with your powerful account and moving stories you shed some most valuable light in that place in darkness the DPRK, your country and home, has become.
We are here to join our voice on behalf of over 25 millions of North Koreans living in the most isolated country on earth, suffering a most oppressive and obsessional regime, known for its unparalleled human rights abuses and its well-documented cruelty.
A country where liberty is only for only one and misery and oppression for all.
Precisely for these reasons, North Koreans, at least some of them, should have been able to follow this event through the WebTV. Because the UN is also their organization. Because it is about them, about their rights or rather, their denial; because it is about humanity or, worse, its absence there.
This is what makes the regime afraid, very afraid: the truth. Denying the truth, preventing these account and powerful voice of these brave persons to air through the UN is punishing North Koreans twice.
Yet truth is hard to conceal and this event is, nonetheless, aired live, will be widely distributed, and North Koreans, at least some of them, will know about it.
Colleagues,
The community of free nations must care about people being paid every month less than the World Bank poverty line per day. This is all this event is about: shedding light on the misery, hardship and suffering of the population and holding the regime to account.
Nearly ten years ago, the Commission of Inquiry report acknowledged two main things:
- Systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials.
- In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity.
Unfortunately, this has not stopped, and DPRK is still continuing with brazen violations of human rights mounting to dehumanization: they include systematic political imprisonment; unlawful detention and enforced disappearance; torture, threat to execution and executions; intimidation and surveillance; transnational repression and abductions, including of Japanese and Republic of Korea nationals. While the regime is breaching every international rule of peace and security and is investing in a missile program and weapons of mass destruction, its population is forced to pure starvation.
Despite this terrible record, the Security Council has been prevented to address them and hold the perpetrators accountable. It must change.
Colleagues,
We are here to speak about a country that has little or no interest in being a member of the international community and has chosen, to the detriment of its citizens, total self-isolation.
Last night they launched a long-range ballistic missile, infringing once more the regional and international peace and security, continuing a year-long policy of provocation and dangerous escalation with WMD, ballistic and nuclear programme.
Those who go the long way to silence the Council and shield the DPRK from the consequences of its escalatory and provocative policies must know that they are putting the entire Asian region and entire world at risk of conflict.
We renew our call to the DPRK to stop and withdrawal from its reckless provocations. Peace and security are not and cannot be empty words; they are commitments, actions and their results.
The Security Council cannot stay aside. It must stand and assume its responsibility.
In conclusion I would like to say that no country and no society can continue to live in seclusion.
When a state fears its citizens, it is a state in trouble and despite draconian rules of censorship, they will never be able to totally annihilate the truth.
It may not transpire on the state-controlled newspapers, it may not appear on the theatrical media; it will be in the whispers, in the looks of the ordinary people, in their un-vanishing hope for change.
I know what I am talking about since my own country, Albania, under a fierce communist regime, tried. I have been part of it until my young adult age.
It failed, miserably and terribly, with huge cost, but at the end, I did not need to defect; the regime defected, the regime lost.
People won.
North Korea will be no exception.
Thank you.
