North Korea Defectors Push Ahead with Leaflet, Aid Campaigns Despite South Korea Legal Threats

On Thursday, the South’s Unification Ministry stated it had requested Seoul police to analyze the teams.

For the previous week, North Korean state media have carried a chain of news and statements from senior officers expressing outrage over defectors, denouncing them as “mongrel canine” and “human scum little in need of wild animals”.

Park Jung-oh, who defected to South Korea in 2000 and heads Kuensaem, stated the organisation continues to be making plans to ship masses of bottles filled with rice, drugs and clinical face mask to North Korea by way of throwing them into the ocean close to the border subsequent week.

Combatants for a Unfastened North Korea, which is administered by way of Park’s brother Park Sang-hak, has additionally stated it plans to ship extra leaflets into North Korea by way of balloon over the closely fortified border.

South Korean government have now and again moved to forestall such operations, together with in 2018 throughout a chain of summits between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean chief Kim Jong Un.

The 2 Koreas even traded fire in 2014 after the North’s army fired system weapons at balloons introduced by way of defector activists.

This week, the ministry stated it was once taking into consideration a regulation to prohibit the leaflets and support, pronouncing they carry tensions with North Korea, pose dangers to South Koreans dwelling close to the border, and purpose environmental injury.

South Korean citizens close to the border have complained concerning the two defector teams they usually had didn’t sign in the products ahead of sending them to the North, the ministry stated when requested why they’d been singled out from round a dozen teams which ship items over the border.

Over the weekend some locals stopped an effort by way of a separate crew to ship bottles of rice by way of sea.

In a ballot launched on Thursday by way of South Korean pollster Realmeter, 50% of the ones surveyed stated they’d fortify a ban on such operations, whilst 41% stated they had been adverse.

Heo Kwang-il, head of the defector-run Committee for the Democratization of North Korea, stated defector teams were doing paintings the Moon management was once failing to do to fortify human rights in North Korea.

US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) known as the leaflets a “reasonably innocuous expressive act” that are meant to now not be banned.

“It’s shameful how President Moon and his executive are utterly unwilling to get up for the rights of North Koreans,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for HRW stated in a commentary.

Engagement with North Korea will have to incorporate South Korean values of democracy and freedom of expression, stated Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea, which helps defectors.

“Ditching such hard-won values to conform to harsh threats from Pyongyang, simply to maintain a veneer of advanced inter-Korean members of the family, units a horrible precedent and places all long run engagement efforts on a tenuous footing,” he stated.