`NK officials urged China to quickly deport defectors`

`NK officials urged China to quickly deport defectors`. February. 27, 2012 08:23. jhk85@donga.com will71@donga.com.

A South Korean lawmaker said Sunday that three senior North Korean officials visited China Friday to ask for the quick repatriation of defectors, promising not to treat them as criminals.

Rep. Park Sun-young of the minor conservative Liberty Forward Party entered the sixth day of her hunger strike to protest China’s deportation of North Korean escapees. She told a news conference in front of the Chinese Embassy in Seoul that the North Korean officials visited a detention center for defectors in Shenyang and were trying to exercise their right to interview them.

“At a time when the South Korean government balks at issuing defectors certificates of South Korean nationality, North Korea has been quick to exercise its right to interview the escapees,” she said, adding that she obtained the information from a source within Chinese public security authorities.

The lawmaker urged the government to exercise its right to interview the escapees to allow them to meet relatives in South Korea and launch a strong protest against Beijing to prevent Pyongyang from coercing them.

“The (South Korean) government should do its best to work with the international community so that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees can make a judgment on the North Korean escapees’ free will,” she said.

“Our constitution considers minors of our citizens as having South Korean nationality. Among the minors detained (in China), those whose parents are already in South Korea have South Korean citizenship,” she added, blasting the North for trying to exercise its right to interview them.

Dismissing the North’s pledge not to treat escapees as criminals as a “scheme,” the lawmaker said Pyongyang made such a promise because of China’s membership in the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Separately, 40 foreign refugees in South Korea held a protest in front of the Chinese Embassy in Seoul with members of the Refuge Pnan, a South Korea-based international activist group for refugees. They held pickets saying, “Save Our Friends.” The refugees, including those from the Congo and Bangladesh, expressed sympathy for the North Korean defectors, saying forcible repatriation is a violation of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and constitutes a crime.

North Korea responded by claiming South Korea is trying to defame the North. A spokesman for the North’s Red Cross Society told Pyongyang`s state-run Korean Central News Agency that Seoul`s opposition to the repatriation of defectors is a scheme to defame the North, calling such efforts a “disgusting and ugly act.”

“The North Korean defector issue is not one of refugees but the outcome of efforts by hostile forces to isolate us from the international community and to lure and abduct our people,” the spokesman said.

On Saturday, North Korea’s propaganda website Uriminzokkiri claimed Pyongyang’s efforts to have the escapees repatriated was a “legitimate act by a sovereign state.”