Anchor: The United Nations General Assembly convened a high-level meeting on Tuesday at the UN headquarters in New York to address human rights violations in North Korea. A UN official who spoke at the meeting said the human rights situation is worsening, and two North Korean defectors shared painful experiences. 
Kim Bum-soo has more. 

Report: Drawing attention at the UN General Assembly meeting Tuesday were the testimonies of two North Korean escapees, Kim Eun-joo and Kang Gyu-ri.

[Sound bite: N. Korean defector Kim Eun-joo] 
“On our first night in China, my 14-year-old sister was kidnapped, sexually abused and left on the roadside. Later, my mother, sister and I, all of us, were sold for only two thousand yuan, less than 300 dollars. This tragedy is not only my family’s story. Many others face the same brutal reality under the North Korean regime even today.”

Kim was eleven years old when she escaped the North in 1999 with her mother and older sister, after losing her father to starvation.

Kim told the UN assembly that young North Korean soldiers are caught up in a new kind of modern-day slavery in the Russia-Ukraine war. 

[Sound bite: N. Korean defector Kim Eun-joo (English)] 
“They have no idea where they are, whom they are fighting against and why, and their lives become a means for the Kim Jong-un regime to make money, while their parents, left behind in North Korea, are forced to endure the unbearable pain of losing their sons as cannon fodder over the foreign battlefield.”

Kang, who is in her early 20s, escaped from the North in 2023 on a wooden fishing boat. 

[Sound bite: N. Korean defector Kang Gyu-ri (English)] 06:07
“As North Korean people were suffering from hyperinflation, economic hardship and widespread hunger, the North Korean authorities used the occasion to eradicate South Korean cultural influence.”

She said her friends were executed for watching South Korean television dramas.

[Sound bite: N. Korean defector Kang Gyu-ri (English)] 06:40
“Three of my friends were executed, two of them in public, for distributing South Korean dramas. One of them was only 19 years old. At first, I could not believe this. Their crime was watching South Korean dramas ...” 

Elizabeth Salmón, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in North Korea, and other UN officials said the human rights situation in North Korea is worsening in many aspects.

[Sound bite: Elizabeth Salmón - UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in North Korea]
“As the DPRK expands its extreme militarization policies, it exacerbates the extensive reliance on forced labor and quota systems, showing how peace, security and human rights are strongly interrelated.”

North Korea’s UN ambassador, Kim Song, denied the accusations, calling the invited witnesses the “scum of the earth” and saying they don’t care about their parents or their families.

South Korean Ambassador to the UN Hwang Joon-kook argued that human rights in North Korea should no longer be regarded as a second-tier issue, overshadowed by the regime’s nuclear weapons program. 

He said the North’s nuclear program is sustained by systemic repression, forced labor, the diversion of natural resources and total control over the people, and that if the human rights violations stop, nuclear weapons development will also stop.

The United Nations Security Council and the United Nations Human Rights Council have held meetings on human rights in North Korea, but this is the first time the UN General Assembly has held a high-level meeting on the issue.
Kim Bum-soo, KBS World Radio News.