'That closet would have been my deathbed': A North Korean defector’s legal victory against Kim Jong-un

[INTERVIEW]

In the two years and three months Choi Min-kyeong spent while held at a North Korean kyohwaso, or reeducation camp, she lost 30 kilograms (66 pounds).

Weighing just 27 kilograms, Choi could barely walk. She thought her time was near as prison guards tossed her into a closet where they dumped the dead bodies of other inmates.

“I don’t know how long I was there for,” the 54-year-old North Korean defector told the Korea JoongAng Daily as she sat for an interview in Nowon District, northern Seoul, recently. “I remember crawling out of the closet and collapsing at the doorway. Next thing I knew, I was finally free.”

Malnutrition, exhaustion from forced labor and disease outbreaks were among the many forms of abuse Choi suffered inside North Korea’s prison camp. It’s why most inmates die before they are released.

Choi was released from the kyohwaso in 2010 and defected to South Korea in 2012. And in late August this year, Choi won an unprecedented legal battle in South Korea against the North Korean regime and its leader Kim Jong-un.

"It's extremely meaningful that the court has acknowledged the claims of a North Korean human rights victim," she said.

Choi is now a human-rights activist as head of the Seoul-based nongovernmental organization NK Imprisonment Victims’ Family Association. She has shared her testimony at numerous human rights conferences in cities including Geneva, New York and London.

Sharing her experiences with the world has opened the door to justice and to international recognition of the human rights situation in North Korea. But Choi is still traumatized by her experiences at the camp and continues to take medication to this day.

"That closet would have been my deathbed, so it was a miracle I survived," Choi said. "Even the investigators at the National Intelligence Service [South Korea’s spy agency] initially didn't believe that I had made it out alive."

Taking North Korea to court

Choi escaped North Korea five times between 1997 and 2012, being forcibly repatriated by Chinese authorities four times and held at North Korean detention facilities each time.

Drawing on these tribulations, Choi filed both civil and criminal cases with the Seoul Central District Court against North Korea and Kim in July last year, becoming the first North Korean-born defector to do so. South Korea’s first North Korean defector-turned-lawyer Lee Young-hyeon was among the lawyers who represented her case.

In her civil suit, she filed a claim for damages for the violations of human rights she suffered while at the North Korean reeducation camp.

The criminal case was trickier. The United Nations has no legal mechanism to arrest a sitting dictator in a sovereign state, so until this point, “there were no means to criminally charge Kim Jong-un,” Choi said.

But in April last year, when North Korea acknowledged for the first time that it had dispatched troops to Russia as aid for the Ukraine War, Choi saw a breakthrough. War crimes are punishable under international law; for instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin has already been indicted by the UN-backed International Criminal Court.

Choi’s lawsuit proceeded through service by publication, a court-approved procedure in which court documents are publicly posted for a specified period when a defendant is deemed absent because they could not be served in North Korea. Since 2019, communication between South and North Korea has been virtually cut off.

She won the civil case in late August, with the court granting her claim for the full 50 million won ($37,000) in damages. The criminal case, however, had its prosecution suspended due to insufficient evidence. Still, she said, it serves as justifiable grounds to arrest Kim if he ever sets foot in South Korea.

“We knew we would win [the civil case] even before the ruling because we had laid out all the evidence, including medical examination records and photos of the scars I had when I first arrived in South Korea,” Choi said. “Thankfully, the case proceeded smoothly and quickly, and we were able to secure the victory.”

A relentless pursuit of freedom

Choi’s decision to flee North Korea in 1997 was driven by the devastating famine of the 1990s, called the Arduous March by North Korea, which amounted to an estimated 3 million deaths. Dead bodies were a frequent sight on the streets during this time, Choi said.

Choi grew up in Kyongwon County, North Hamgyong Province, in a middle-class family, with her father serving as a secretary for the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. Several of her relatives were also members of the party.

Choi and her mother decided to defect to Hunchun in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture because they had relatives living there. In December 1997, they crossed a frozen Tumen River.

“It was easier to escape back then,” Choi said, noting that there were fewer physical barriers and less high-tech surveillance along the border.

In China, Choi got married to an ethnic Korean Chinese man and had one daughter. She was an obedient, hard-working homemaker who was told by Chinese authorities that all she had to do was “abide by the law” and that “there would be no problem.”

But the North’s mass famine had caused a surge of defectors to China toward the end of the 1990s, with data suggesting that at least hundreds of thousands were residing there. The Chinese government began offering cash rewards to individuals who reported North Korean defectors, who would then be forcibly repatriated.

Choi was no exception. In April 2000, one of her in-laws ratted her out to the authorities, and she was deported back to North Korea, leaving her barely year-old child behind in China.

Choi spent about two months in a short-term detention center while awaiting sentencing. Thanks to her family’s connections, Choi was bailed out, and she immediately defected for the second time for the sake of her daughter.

Choi’s mother was repatriated as well but later died in the detention center.

Choi defected three more times between 2002 and 2008, being forcibly sent back to the North every few years but released from detention shortly after. But in her fourth repatriation in July 2008, during the Summer Olympics in Beijing, when a mass deportation of North Korean defectors was ordered by the Chinese government, the situation took a turn for the worse.

In North Korea, repeat defectors face increasingly harsh sentences, and Choi was eventually sent to a reeducation camp for the first time, where inmates convicted of nonpolitical crimes are usually given sentences between one and 15 years. She was sentenced to three years.

A fate worse than death

The first thing Choi did when she entered the Chongori Reeducation Camp, or Kyohwaso No. 12, which is located in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province, was undergo an invasive and degrading body search.

Prison guards forced the female inmates to strip from head to toe to conduct vaginal and anal examinations, attempting to find and confiscate hidden money.

Inmates were also forced to repeatedly squat and rise and “pump out” whatever they may have inside their body, from as few as 50 times to as many as 1,000 times, Choi said, calling it the “pigeon torture” method.

“If money was found, inmates would be dragged to a separate room and beaten to the brink of death,” she said. “There were so many girls and young women who were bleeding because of their period, but it didn’t matter. It was such a shameful experience to have as a woman.”

Choi described the food she was served — rice with beans that included sand, gravel and other inedible powdery substances — as “barbaric,” adding that “even animals are fed better.”

Choi saw “heaps of dead bodies” that would casually be dumped at the cremation sites for dead inmates at the camp.

“Stray dogs would carry around partially burned human flesh in their mouths, and never did I know that blue smoke rises from bones when human bodies are burned,” Choi said.

North Korea granted a mass pardon to prisoners, including Choi, around Sept. 9, 2010, in celebration of the regime’s first public introduction of Kim as the successor of his father, then-leader Kim Jong-il (1941-2011). Choi was released nine months early.

She defected from North Korea for the fifth and last time in January 2012 and went through Laos and Thailand to enter South Korea in October the same year. After acquiring South Korean citizenship, she returned to bring her daughter from China to South Korea.

There were 34 North Korean defectors, including herself, who lived in the same countryside area in China and were forcibly repatriated to the North, according to Choi. Six of them survived and have since settled in South Korea. Four have even reunited at church and other events, but the whereabouts of the other two remain unknown.

The symbolic victory's next step

Choi’s case is mainly symbolic, as there are realistic difficulties in receiving compensation from North Korea. Nonetheless, she has plans.

North Korea does not have assets in South Korea that are readily available for seizure. There are a few North Korea-related funds in South Korea, including the coffers of the Foundation of Inter-Korea Cooperation, which collects royalties for North Korean videos or other copyrighted works used in South Korean media.

As the royalties are pending disbursement, multiple lawsuits have been filed seeking to use the funds to pay compensation to North Korean human rights victims, but it remains legally contested.

The South Korean Ministry of Unification’s subscription fee for the North’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which amounts to around 1.91 million won per year, is another option.

She could also aim to seize the ministry’s Inter-Korean Cooperation Fund, which is budgeted at around 1 trillion won annually. As of Sept. 17, only 1.1 percent of the funds had been used due to the continued strained relationship between the South and the North.

Choi is even considering ways to freeze Kim’s overseas slush funds.

For now, an English translation of her book, “Escape from North Korea” (2024), where she details her full defection and imprisonment experience, is underway. The book features drawings by a fellow North Korean defector who was also detained at a reeducation camp. A South Korean human rights activist acquired the drawings in China, but the artist has since been sent to a kwalliso, or political prison camp where inmates are typically held for life.

Choi emphasized the need for a museum on North Korean human rights in South Korea. One was in the works under the previous Yoon Suk Yeol administration, but was scrapped following his impeachment in early 2025 and has not been revived under the current Lee Jae Myung administration.

“Human rights are universal rights that everyone is entitled to enjoy. It’s so frustrating that even a simple concept is used as a political tool,” Choi said.

“Even the United States has a Holocaust Memorial Museum. How would people in South Korea know what’s happening in North Korea right now, if no one tries to tell them?”

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [[email protected]]