Here is the latest of the North Korea restaurant worker defector case:
Attorneys from the Lawyers for a Democratic Society hold a press conference outside the Seoul Central District Court on Tuesday. [SHIN IN-SEOP]A Seoul court held a hearing Tuesday after a group of lawyers challenged the legitimacy of the South Korean government holding a group of North Korean restaurant workers who defected in April in a state protection facility.
Last month, the Lawyers for a Democratic Society, also referred to as Minbyun, filed a petition with the Seoul Central District Court questioning whether the defectors came to the South out of their own free will, after the country’s top spy agency denied an interview with the defectors.
The defectors themselves did not attend the first hearing at the Seoul Central District Court on Tuesday afternoon, but their legal representatives did. On the same day, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) decided that the 13 North Korean restaurant workers would not be sent to a defector resettlement facility but rather be kept in a protection facility that it operates.
The group of 12 female workers and their male manager who worked at Ryugyong in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, one of Pyongyang’s many overseas restaurants in China, defected to the South in early April. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but I am still suspicious of these progressive lawyers who seem like they are more about representing North Korean interests than the best interests of these defectors.
Via a reader tip comes the below article about how a progressive legal team is trying to gain access to the 13 North Korean restaurant workers that defected to South Korea:
North Korean defectors arriving in the South on April 7. The defectors in custody have not had contact with legal counsel, according to a group of South Korean attorneys. File Photo courtesy of Republic of Korea Ministry of Unification
A progressive South Korean legal organization has been denied access to the 13 North Korean defectors who fled a state-run restaurant in China.
Lawyers for a Democratic Society had requested interviews with the North Korean waitresses and their manager, but after being rejected at the defector custody center is planning to take legal action, Yonhap reported.
During a press conference Monday, the lawyers said they were told by an intelligence official that access was not allowed because the “North Korean workers had entered South Korea out of their own free will.”
“If that is correct, the government must grant them their right to counsel,” the lawyers told reporters. [UPI]
You can read the rest at the link, but it is likely that the ROK intelligence officers are concerned that the lawyers like some other progressive groups in South Korea are influenced by North Korean handlers. The Kim regime has been launching a vigorous propaganda campaign against the defectors and I would not put it past them to use these lawyers to pass messages about how their family members are being threatened back in North Korea by their defection and to come back.
ROK Drop favorite Park Sang-hak and his group have continued with their propaganda balloon campaign against North Korea in the wake of the Kim regime’s repeated weapons tests:
An organization made up of North Korean escapees and a conservative civic group have distributed some 100-thousand leaflets denouncing the North’s nuclear and missile tests across the border.
Amid the heightened inter-Korean tension, Fighters for Free North Korea and the National Action Campaign for Freedom and Democracy in Korea distributed the leaflets on Monday in Paju, Gyeonggi Province near the border.
The organizations said that the people have the obligation to chastise Kim Jong-un’s threats and provocations regardless of whether or not the South’s government and military engage in psychological warfare.
The organizations then called on the public to join movements to send balloons containing leaflets to the North.
Last Saturday, Fighters for Free North Korea distributed 80-thousand leaflets condemning the North from Gimpo and Paju, as the day marked the sixth anniversary of the sinking of the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan torpedoed by Pyongyang.
Park Sang-hak, the head of the group, said that the organization will continue to send what will be a combined ten million leaflets critical of Pyongyang over the next three months. [KBS World Radio]
How many nations openly discuss assassinating the leader of a neighboring nation like the North Koreans do? The rhetoric from North Korea recently seems to have reached a new level which makes me wonder if the sanctions really are beginning to bite?:
North Korea threatened Wednesday to wage a retaliatory war against President Park Geun-hye in the latest show of defiance against tougher U.N. sanctions and joint military drills between Seoul and Washington.
North Korea vowed to “launch a retaliatory battle of justice to resolutely eliminate” the United States and Park, warning that it is ready to turn South Korea’s presidential office into a sea of fire.
“The powerful large-caliber multiple rocket launching systems of invincible Korean People’s Army artillery units are highly alerted to scorch Cheong Wa Dae… in a jiffy,” the North’s committee handling inter-Korean affairs said in a statement carried by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency. [Yonhap]
It looks like South Korean students will no longer be dressed in clothes made by quasi-slave labor:
Tens of thousands of secondary school students may not be able to wear school uniforms for the upcoming semester, as suppliers based in the Gaeseong Industrial Complex (GIC) are unable to deliver the goods in time after the complex was shut down due to strained inter-Korean relations.
Those students may have to wait for up to two more months to buy new uniforms, while the new semester begins on March 2.
A day after South Korea announced the shutdown of the inter-Korean industrial park on Feb. 10, North Korea expelled all South Korean workers from the complex.
According to Mansun, a uniform subcontractor to Hyungji Elite, the largest school uniform manufacturer here, more than 80,000 sets of uniforms were left behind in its factory in Gaeseong.
“When we were forced out, we were not allowed to take our products with us,” an official from Mansun said. “Not only us but three other subcontractors for school uniform manufacturers were prevented from bringing the products, causing the uniform supply shortage.” [Korea Times]
The North Koreans keeping getting more and more lewd in regards to their comments about South Korean President Park Geun-hye:
North Korea responded to an unusually harsh verbal attack by South Korea’s president against the North’s leader and its recent nuclear test and rocket launch with a characteristically colorful invective of its own Saturday, calling her policy traitorous and adding that Washington’s newly enacted sanctions are “laughable.”
The North’s official reaction — including the insult “senile granny” — was expected, though it took several days for Pyongyang to announce it through its state-run media.
North Korea regularly condemns South Korean President Park Geun-hye through sexist and violent language, saying recently that she lives upon “the groin of her American boss.” [Associated Press]
A ROK Drop favorite Park Sang-hak and other North Korean defectors have had security measures improved for them when the ROK National Intelligence Service (NIS) learned of specific information about North Korean terror and assassination attempts within the ROK. In the case of Park Sang-hak the North Koreans have tried to kill him before:
Following the latest intelligence assessment that North Korea is planning terrorist attacks against the South, security measures to protect high-value targets including influential defectors have been beefed up.
The National Police Agency has reinforced the security detail for former North Korean diplomat Ko Young-hwan, vice president of the Institute for National Security Strategy of the National Intelligence Service (NIS). He was put under the highest level of monitoring, as the intelligence community obtained a death threat from the North.
Ko served in the North’s Foreign Ministry from 1978 to 1991. He defected from his post as the first secretary of the North Korean Embassy in the Republic of Congo in 1991.
“I was told by the police that they had obtained specific threats,” Ko told Yonhap News Agency. “I was normally guarded by two agents, but the number has increased to eight.”
The police also improved security measures for Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector currently leading the campaign to send anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border using balloons.
The North has previously assassinated a high-profile defector in the South. Yi Han-yong, nephew of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s mistress Song Hye-rim, defected to the South in 1982 while studying in Switzerland. He was shot in February 1997 by two assailants suspected of being agents from North Korean special forces. He died in a hospital later that month.
The NIS informed the government and the ruling party Thursday that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had ordered the country’s intelligence agencies to prepare for terror attacks against the South. In addition to threats on cyberattacks and attacks on public facilities, assassination and kidnapping of high-value targets were also feared. [Joong Ang lbo]
South Koreans are asking their citizens to not eat at North Korean sponsored restaurants overseas to cut hard currency going to the Kim regime. Should the US government takes this mentality a step forward and ban travel to North Korea by its citizens to also cut hard currency going to the regime, not to mention stopping the constant trickle of American detainee issues that have to be dealt with:
South Koreans’ stomachs are the latest front in the standoff with North Korea.
South Koreans have been told not to eat at North Korea’s restaurants around the world, although such visits aren’t illegal, the South’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.
Most of the restaurants are in China, and Chinese and other nationalities frequent them more than South Koreans do, so analysts see little impact. But the move is symbolic of a tougher stance from the South since North Korea’s nuclear test last month and its recent rocket launch, which many outsiders see as a banned test of ballistic missile technology. [Associated Press]
