Connor Norton - North Korea’s prisons are as bad as Nazi camps, says judge who survived Auschwitz

3 judges have recently taken up the task of holding Kim Jong Un accountable for 10 crimes against humanity in front of the International Criminal court, with charges including murder, enslavement, torture, and sexual violence in the country's political prisons. One of the judges, Thomas Buergenthal, said that after hearing testimony from escaped North Koreans and seeing satellite images that the humanitarian crisis in NK may be as bad as if not worse than the Holocaust, and he survived Auschwitz and the Polish ghetto of Kielce. Another of the 3 judges, Navi Pillay, presided over the International Criminal Tribunal after the genocide in Rwanda and the final judge, Mark Harmon, worked on the war crimes cases of Yugoslavia and Cambodia. The totalitarian state of North Korea has been proven through the aforementioned satellite imaging and human testimony of holding masses of people in labor camps with 20-hour work days in the mines and sex crimes leading to sometimes-fatal forced abortions; the judge that worked on the Rwandan genocide said there is "no comparable situation in the world, past or present". However, it is unlikely that these charges will go anywhere, as they require the approval of at least 5 permanent members of the UN Security Counsel, and Russia and China have both said that they will not support and such charges against Kim Jong Un.

This relates in American history to the Japanese internment camps operated by the US during WWII, as although they were not as physically and mentally crushing as the labor camps of NK or the Holocaust, it was a period in which an entire group of the American populace was subject to unjust and warrant-less arrest and imprisonment in camps that isolated them from the rest of the world. The Japanese internment camps represent one of the great sources of shame in American history and for good reason; the harsh regime of Kim Kong Un will no doubt be remembered as a similar blotch upon the world.