Lord Alton raised the escalation of Putin’s war in Ukraine by the role of North Korea’s dictatorship & failure to bring it to justice for crimes against humanity. Keir Starmer should broadcast directly to the nation about the gravity of the situation.
Lord Alton of Liverpool
25th October 2024.
Three short questions for the Minister before some remarks about North Korea.
Firstly, what progress has been made in releasing funds to Ukraine from the £2.5 billion sale of Chelsea Football Club sale, and the £783,000 recovered in the Petr Aven case?
Secondly, an issue I raised with the Minister on Monday, what prosecutions will be mounted against those UK insurers who cover the 12 sanctions busting Liquefied Natural Gas tankers currently benefiting from UK Protection and Indemnity insurance ?
And thirdly will we look at amending the legal limitations in Sections 51 and 58 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001 preventing the UK from prosecuting core international crimes and the role that universal jurisdiction might play in ensuring justice?
During Question Time on Wednesday, I referred to Monday’s meeting of the All Party North Korea Group, which I co-chair with Sir Iain Duncan-Smith MP.
We discussed how ten years ago a United Nations Commission of Inquiry described North Korea as a country “without parallel” and guilty of crimes against humanity. It called for the leadership to be referred by the Security Council to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. We have never tabled a Resolution to dop that. The Minister promised to reflect on that.
This same regime has violated Security Council Resolutions, developing weapons of mass destruction and circumventing sanctions.
Emboldened by this failure to hold it to account it has shipped at least 16,500 containers of munitions, perhaps as many as 4.8 million artillery shells, and scores of ballistic missiles to aid Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Robert Koepche, the US Assistant Secretary of State, believes Russia has launched more than 65 missiles of North Korean origin at targets in Ukraine – and, with Iran and China, widening and escalating the existential war in Ukraine which threatens free societies the world over.
I have visited North Korea.
I saw grinding poverty, food shortages and stunted growth caused by malnutrition.
Its dangerously provocative missile tests cost about $1 billion last year -around 4% of North Korea’s economy – with at least 16% of government expenditure on its war machine – money which could have fed its people ten times over.
It constantly threatens its neighbours with dictator Kim calling for an “exponential increase” of nuclear warheads, mass production of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons and the development of more advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to reach the U.S. mainland.
Now as part of Lord Robertson of Ellen Port’s “a deadly quartet” an axis of dictators – anything between 2,000 and 13,000 North Korean soldiers are being trained in Eastern Russia for combat in Putin’s war.
This is part of a global struggle; it is ultimately about dictatorship or democracy.
We have been here before.
During the Cold War we saw security and our democratic values – openly expressed and promoted in the Helsinki Process -as two sides of one coin and exemplified by the leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – with singular others, such as Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and John Paul II understanding the enormity of the challenge but the opportunity it presented too.
That same earnest desire for freedom that brought down the Berlin Wall – 35 years ago next month – is there in North Korea too.
Ask the more than 30,000 escapees, some of whom experienced the gulags, in which100,000 people are still held – and characterised by torture, brutality and degradation.
Ask the young solider who in August, risked his life, to walk through a minefield, to gain the freedom of democratic South Korea.
Ask the family which last year managed to get out of North Korea, in a small boat, and one of whom described how he had been forced to watch the execution of a 22 year-old caught listening to South Korean music and viewing banned movies.
Or ask the North Korean teenagers sentenced to hard labour caught looking at K-drama.
Be clear: this is one of the most repressive and controlling states on earth.
So we must reach over the heads of Putin and Kim – before more young men are sent to their deaths, this time on the front line in Ukraine. By physical or cyber messaging they must be told that they can walk to freedom across the front line in Ukraine – with a route to a new life in Seoul, with citizenship guaranteed under South Korea’s constitution.
And this is not a flight of fancy.
In 2016, Thae Yong-ho, deputy North Korean ambassador in London walked out of the embassy, with his family, and never returned. In due course he was elected to the South Korean National Assembly.
He told me that his observation of our way of life had convinced him of the case for democracy rather than dictatorship.
In addition, to boldly offering an alternative to totalitarianism, why aren’t we using our place at the Security Council to demand that the UN’s own findings of crimes against humanity reaches the ICC or ICJ.
If it is vetoed, we must create our own special court, as we did in 1945.
The responsibility for crimes against humanity, WMD and violations of UN Security Council resolutions, and now soldiers sent to fight in Europe, resides with the Workers’ Party of Korea and the singular authority of its Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un.
Democracies and countries that prize the upholding of international law must use their considerable resources to demonstrate to dictators and totalitarian regimes that, however long it takes, they will be held to account and brought to justice.
I hope that the Minister will agree.
