The Hidden Gulag - US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea

The Hidden Gulag Second Edition“ethnic cleansing” (deportations of ethnic orreligious minorities from areas where they werepreviously lawfully resident). 118The ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslaviathat were established by the UN Security Councilin the early and mid-1990s recognized andtackled these gaps in the international humanrights normative, legal, and analytical framework.Subsequent multilateral treaties such asthe International Convention for the Protectionof all Persons from Enforced Disappearancealso tackled these gaps. And the normative gapsnoted above were addressed in the 1997 negotiationsto draft the Statute for the InternationalCriminal Court (ICC). These juridical proceedingsand diplomatic and legal negotiationsmade an invaluable adjustment to the normativeframework for analyzing contemporary phenomenaof repression: an inclusionary and moreworkable definition of “crimes against humanity.”The Nuremberg Tribunal placed crimes againsthumanity in the context of international armedconflict—atrocities committed against civiliansin a time of war (in parallel with war crimes,which were atrocities committed against enemycombatants in time of war). The InternationalCriminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia(ICTY) retained the connection to armedconflict, but the armed conflict no longer neededto be international in character. The InternationalCriminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)established no connection to armed conflict.At the Rome negotiations for the statutes of asia, to which tens of thousands were deported and detained in thelate 1960s and 1970s because the Indonesian government admitted,there was no evidence of criminal acts that could be used to bringthese people to trial.permanent international criminal court, thelink to armed conflict remained severed. Drawingheavily on what jurists and legal scholarsrefer to as customary international law and thejudicial rulings and determinations of the ad hoctribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, “crimesagainst humanity” were defined as: murder;extermination; enslavement; deportation orforcible population transfer; imprisonment orsevere deprivations of physical liberty (in violationof fundamental rules of international law);torture; rape or sexual slavery; persecution onpolitical, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, genderor religious grounds; enforced disappearances;apartheid; and other inhumane acts of a similarcharacter when knowingly committed as part ofa widespread or systematic course of conductagainst a civilian population in furtherance ofstate policy.These phenomena of repression—now recognizedand proscribed as atrocity crimes—arepart and parcel of the systems of repressiondescribed by the former prisoners and torturevictims interviewed for this report, in additionto a very large number of “gross violations” ofthe norms and standards set forth in the InternationalCovenants. As noted above, this updatednormative framework entered into force as thefirst edition of Hidden Gulag was being readiedfor publication. The present edition is able to usethe updated normative framework and incorporatethe judgments and proceedings of the AdHoc Tribunals and the standards set forth inthe Rome Statute of the International CriminalCourt, which, as of November 2011, has beensigned by 139 UN Member States and ratified bysome 117.118 As practiced in the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s.157