Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Perhaps it is because of my family background that I often speak in this House on matters of egregious abuses of human rights. I do not think there is anywhere else in the world where there is a greater abuse of human rights—and I include the terrible situations in Darfur, in Burma and in Zimbabwe—than in the hellish state of North Korea. We often make jokes about the dear leader Kim Jong-Il and the laughable Stalinoid military parades of the North Korean regime. Surprisingly—or not surprisingly, perhaps—it may be because of the lack of success of the attempted illegal heroin trade via the North Korean ship Pong Su that the North Korean embassy has just closed here. Apparently Pyongyang’s embassies all operate on the basis of having to fund themselves—most of them, as we know, by illegal activities.

In North Korea, two million people died recently during the famine. The state of human rights in that country is one of the most desperate in the world. Because I take these things seriously, I went to London to attend the 8th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees, which was held at Chatham House, with the earlier donors’ conference held in the Attlee Room in an extension of the House of Commons. We heard from some of the extraordinary people who are bringing the situation of North Korea to the attention of the international community. The conference was organised jointly by the Citizens Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, Korea University’s Graduate School of International Studies, Chatham House and the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights in Norway. It was sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Norwegian foreign ministry and the Chosun Ilbo, the South Korean donor. We had very passionate addresses from Kjell Magne Bondevik, the former Norwegian Prime Minister, and Lord David Alton, chairman of the UK’s North Korea All-Party Parliamentary Group. Perhaps this House should examine the idea of looking at the human rights situations in countries we do not have diplomatic representation with at the moment, with the North Koreans leaving.

I want to focus on the North Koreans whom I met there. I have met one of them before. One of the documents—if that is what we can call it—that I got there was an incredible picture that you can get from Google Earth of the Korean peninsula at night. Of course, South Korea is all lit up, but there is not a single point of light in the whole of North Korea. The desperate lives that people must live in that benighted country are evidenced by this document, which I will seek to table in a minute. But the North Koreans impressed me so much. There was a former North Korean Air Force captain, Park Myeong-ho, and other people who spoke about engagement with North Korea. North Korea seems to be being affected by the opening up of the world, particularly South Korea, towards it. There are satellite phones that border guards now use to contact North Korean dissident groups and radio stations in South Korea. The regime seems to be crumbling, and I think it is incumbent on the world community to see that this does not happen in a way that is unmanaged, with hundreds of thousands of refugees and desperate people coming out.

I want to focus on two people in particular. One is a great Australian scholar and fluent Korean Speaker, Andrei Lankov, formerly of the ANU and now professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, who has the idea of engagement with North Korea with a view to improving human rights in that country which can only happen with changing the regime. The second is the pianist Kim Cheol Woong, who shows the human potential of the North Korean people. He was here last year in Australia to open the Melbourne Jazz Festival. The crime that he was jailed for originally in North Korea was that he played jazz in his repetoire at a Korean concert. That shows the kind of state North Korea is, when it can jail a great artiste like him. To see Kim Cheol Woong here in Australia entertaining Australian people and then to see him there at the conference in London is an example of the human potential in North Korea and perhaps why that regime needs to be changed. I am very proud to report they are bringing the ninth conference on North Korean human rights to Australia to be held in Melbourne in January next year. (Time expired)

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