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North Korea Discredits Human Rights Campaign After Defector Changes His Story

Shin Dong-hyuk’s admission that he had altered portions of his life story prompted a North Korea propaganda outlet to charge that allegations against the regime were the work of deception.
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Shortly after one of North Korea's most prominent defectors adjusted his account of life in one of the country's most notorious prison camps, the government in Pyongyang seized on the revelation as an opportunity to invalidate the international human rights campaign against leader Kim Jong-un's regime.

A post on the state-run North Korean propaganda site Uriminzokkiri dated Monday claimed that calls for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate violations within the Hermit Kingdom were discredited by refugee and activist Shin Dong-hyuk's admission to author Blaine Harden that he had altered portions of his life story, which was recounted in a 2012 book by Harden (Escape from Camp 14) as well as during Shin's testimony before the United Nations.

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"International organizations and major European countries must have faces reddened with humiliation for they were deceived by the likes of Shin Dong-hyuk," the Uriminzokkiri report read, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Shin's story of life inside prison Camp 14, located outside of Pyongyang, offered a rare glimpse into conditions of the country's labor camps, including details of forced labor, physical punishment, and trials of illness and food shortages. In his original account, Shin said that he was born inside the camp and had spent his entire life within its confines with his mother and brother prior to escaping.

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The South Korean-based activist admitted to Harden on Friday that he had not, in fact, been confined to Camp 14 his whole life. Shin explained that he and his family were actually sent to a less severe camp for a period, and that he was later transferred back to Camp 14, from which he escaped.

"I didn't realize that changing these details would be important," the 32-year-old Shin told Harden, according to a statement on the author's website. "I feel very bad that I wasn't able to come forward with the full truth at the beginning."

According to Harden, Shin said that he had altered details to avoid particularly hurtful memories.

"I found it was too painful to think about some of the things that happened," he said. "I altered some details that I thought wouldn't matter. I didn't want to tell exactly what happened in order not to relive these painful moments all over again."

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Some details, dates, places, and circumstances were changed, but Harden noted that "they in no way changed the horror of his story."

"From a human rights perspective, he was still brutally tortured, but he moved things around," Harden told the Washington Post, for whom he had originally reported Shin's story in a 2008 article.

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Harden described the revisions as generally consistent with the reporting he had done for his book and with Shin's 2013 testimony in front of a UN Commission of Inquiry on North Korean human rights abuses. The commission's report, published last year, determined that North Korea had committed widespread violations.

Following the inquiry, the UN General Assembly adopted a non-binding resolution in December asking the Security Council to refer the alleged crimes against humanity to the ICC for investigation.

The commission's chairman, Michael Kirby, told CNN that Shin's revisions should not affect its credibility, noting that the 400-page report only included two paragraphs concerning his testimony. Kirby said that many people participated in the inquiry, providing "powerful and convincing" stories that are representative of experiences in North Korea.

"It's a very small part of a very long story. And it really doesn't affect the credibility of the testimony, which is online," he said. "It seems as if the issue is whether he was in the total control zone, or whether he was in an ordinary prison camp. In another words, it's whether triple horror or double horror."

Photo via Flickr