NHRCK announced its position as follows to protect human rights of North Korean female defectors who stay in china and children born between the defectors and native Chinese men.
The Foreign Secretary must step up efforts to suspend compulsive repatriation of the North Korean female defectors to North Korea toward chinese government. The compulsive repatriation of the defectors who give birth in china separates them from their children and brings the breakdown of family, harming normal nurture and growth of children, which caused serious humanitarian issues.
The Minister of Unification must prepare and implement feasible measure for aid to improve human rights of children who are lack of care from family through understanding current situations that chinese born children whose mothers are North Korean defectors have faced with. Besides, when the children settle in South Korea, the Minister must prepare the measure to give assistance equivalent to that of child defectors born in North Korea.
In 2012, NHRCK conducted the research on human right situations of child defectors staying in China whose mothers are North Korean defectors. The research subjects include the 100 child defectors and current recipients.
According to the result, it is estimated that there are about 4,000 children who didn't receive care from family or relatives and get protection from 'Shimteo' run by a South Korean religious group. However, the number of children ranges from 10,000 at minimum through 60,000 at maximum depending on researchers.
71 out of the 100 subjects are not living together with their mother. The reasons are mothers' repatriation for 36, mothers disappearance from home for 31 and it was proved that 12 of the mothers who disappeared went to South Korea. Of the 71, the number of children who have been keeping in touch with their mothers turn out to be 21, which accounts for only 29.6% of all the respondents.
The compulsive repatriation and mothers' disappearance due to fear for the repatriation have been the main reason of the breakdown of family. Besides, the breakdown of family and complete separation do seriously harm the growth of children, causing serious humanitarian issues because of the low possibility of reunion between mothers and children.
In the aspect of system, the chinese born children whose mothers are defectors are not contained into the assistance subjects of resettlement funds but just North Korean defectors coming to South Korea are according to a related law. Therefore, it turned out that there is a problem not to count the Chinese born children as the recipients of the initial resettlement funds when they arrive in South Korea.
To solve these issues, NHRCK recommended that our government should prepare a feasible measure to improve the current situations of human rights by reason that the issue of the Chinese born children whose mothers are North Korean defectors is connected to that of North Korean defectors. Moreover, NHRCK decided to make this announcement judging that the Chinese born children should enable to receive resettlement funds as other North Korean child defectors do and our government should step up diplomatic efforts to suspend the compulsive repatriation of the North Korean female defectors which leads to the breakdown of family and the complete separation from children toward the chinese government.
