The U.S. Congress has passed legislation that requires the government to submit a report on North Korea's political prison camps amid mounting international pressure on Pyongyang over its human rights violations, sources said Friday.
The bill, H.R.4681, passed through the House of Representatives and the Senate on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, the sources said. It was believed to be the first time that Congress has requested a report on the North's prison camps.
The move came as international pressure has been mounting on North Korea to improve its human rights record, with a U.N. General Assembly committee passing a landmark resolution last month that calls for referring the issue to the International Criminal Court.
When the bill was first initiated in the House by Mike Rogers (R-MI), it did not require reporting on the North's prison camps. But the section was included in the Senate version of the bill submitted by Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and was later added to the final legislation, the sources said.
The legislation calls for the government to submit a report on the North's prison camps to the intelligence committees of the House and the Senate, and to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The report should describe the actions the United States is taking to support implementation of the recommendations of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the North's human rights, including the eventual establishment of a tribunal to hold individuals accountable for abuses, the legislation said.
It should also include the estimated prisoner population of each such camp, its geographical coordinates, the reasons for confining the prisoners at each camp, a description of the primary industries and products made at each such camp, and the end users of any goods produced at each camp.
The legislation also calls for information identifying individuals and agencies responsible for conditions in each political prison camp at all levels of the North's government, a de0scription of the conditions under which prisoners are confined, with respect to the adequacy of food, shelter, medical care, working conditions, reports of ill-treatment of prisoners, and unclassified imagery, including satellite imagery, of each such camp.
North Korea has long been labeled as one of the worst human rights violators in the world. The communist regime does not tolerate dissent, holds hundreds of thousands of people in political prison camps and keeps tight control over outside information.
But Pyongyang has bristled at such criticism, calling it a U.S.-led attempt to topple its regime.
(Yonhap)
