“Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are; their seed must be eliminated through three generations.” – Kim Il-sung (1972)
While it is certain that North Korea has committed a political and ideological genocide, which has claimed millions of innocent lives, it is often overlooked that the North Korean regime has also in every aspect violated the UN Genocide Convention, to which it is a state party.
Raphael Lemkin’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was enacted in the wake of the Holocaust and the unprecedented devastation of World War-II. This was the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations, and was intended to serve as a legal infrastructure which, if followed faithfully, would not only assist in preventing genocide from happening again, but also facilitate intervention in the event of a genocide which is underway.
Article 2 of the 1948 Convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
