Latest news with #Seoul-based
Daily Maverick
12 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Rights abuses continue in North Korea a decade after probe, says UN investigator
A decade after a landmark U.N. report concluded North Korea committed crimes against humanity, a U.N. official investigating rights in the isolated state told Reuters many abuses continue, exacerbated by COVID-era controls that have yet to be lifted. James Heenan, who represents the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, said he is still surprised by the continued prevalence of executions, forced labour and reports of starvation in the authoritarian country. Later this year Heenan's team will release a follow-up report to the 2014 findings by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which said the government had committed 'systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations' that constituted crimes against humanity. DPRK is North Korea's official name. While the conclusions of this year's report are still being finalised, Heenan told Reuters in an interview that the last 10 years have seen mixed results, with North Korea's government engaging more with some international institutions, but doubling down on control at home. 'The post-COVID period for DPRK means a period of much greater government control over people's lives and restrictions on their freedoms,' he said in the interview. North Korea's embassy in London did not answer phone calls seeking comment. The government has in the past denied abuses and accused the U.N. and foreign countries of trying to use human rights as a political weapon to attack North Korea. A Reuters investigation in 2023 found leader Kim Jong Un had spent much of the COVID pandemic building a massive string of walls and fences along the previously porous border with China, and later built fences around the capital of Pyongyang. A report this week by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said the COVID pandemic raged in North Korea for more than two years before the regime admitted in May 2022 that the virus had permeated its borders, and that the regime bungled the response in a way that violated freedoms and left most citizens to fend for themselves. On Wednesday SI Analytics, a Seoul-based satellite imagery firm, released a report noting North Korea is renovating a key prison camp near the border with China, possibly in response to international criticism, while simultaneously strengthening physical control over prisoners under the pretence of facility improvement. Heenan said his team has talked to more than 300 North Koreans who fled their country in recent years, and many expressed despair. 'Sometimes we hear people saying they sort of hope a war breaks out, because that might change things,' he said. A number of those interviewees will speak publicly for the first time next week as part of an effort to put a human face on the U.N. findings. 'It's a rare opportunity to hear from people publicly what they want to say about what's happening in the DPRK,' Heenan said. He expressed concern about funding cuts for international aid and U.N. programmes around the world, which is pressuring human rights work and threatening support for North Korean refugees. While human rights has traditionally been a politically volatile subject not only for Pyongyang but for foreign governments trying to engage with the nuclear-armed North, Heenan said the issues like prison camps need to be part of any engagement on a political settlement. 'There's no point self-censoring on human rights, because… no one's fooled,' he said.
Otago Daily Times
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
Rights abuses continue in North Korea: investigator
A decade after a landmark U.N. report concluded North Korea committed crimes against humanity, a U.N. official investigating rights in the isolated state says many abuses continue, exacerbated by COVID-era controls that have yet to be lifted. James Heenan, who represents the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, said he is still surprised by the continued prevalence of executions, forced labour and reports of starvation in the authoritarian country. Later this year Heenan's team will release a follow-up report to the 2014 findings by the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which said the government had committed "systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations" that constituted crimes against humanity. DPRK is North Korea's official name. While the conclusions of this year's report are still being finalised, Heenan told Reuters in an interview that the last 10 years have seen mixed results, with North Korea's government engaging more with some international institutions, but doubling down on control at home. "The post-COVID period for DPRK means a period of much greater government control over people's lives and restrictions on their freedoms," he said in the interview. North Korea's embassy in London did not answer phone calls seeking comment. The government has in the past denied abuses and accused the U.N. and foreign countries of trying to use human rights as a political weapon to attack North Korea. A Reuters investigation in 2023 found leader Kim Jong Un had spent much of the COVID pandemic building a massive string of walls and fences along the previously porous border with China, and later built fences around the capital of Pyongyang. A report this week by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said the COVID pandemic raged in North Korea for more than two years before the regime admitted in May 2022 that the virus had permeated its borders, and that the regime bungled the response in a way that violated freedoms and left most citizens to fend for themselves. On Wednesday SI Analytics, a Seoul-based satellite imagery firm, released a report noting North Korea is renovating a key prison camp near the border with China, possibly in response to international criticism, while simultaneously strengthening physical control over prisoners under the pretence of facility improvement. Heenan said his team has talked to more than 300 North Koreans who fled their country in recent years, and many expressed despair. "Sometimes we hear people saying they sort of hope a war breaks out, because that might change things," he said. A number of those interviewees will speak publicly for the first time next week as part of an effort to put a human face on the U.N. findings. "It's a rare opportunity to hear from people publicly what they want to say about what's happening in the DPRK," Heenan said. He expressed concern about funding cuts for international aid and U.N. programmes around the world, which is pressuring human rights work and threatening support for North Korean refugees. While human rights has traditionally been a politically volatile subject not only for Pyongyang but for foreign governments trying to engage with the nuclear-armed North, Heenan said the issues like prison camps need to be part of any engagement on a political settlement. "There's no point self-censoring on human rights, because... no one's fooled," he said.
Express Tribune
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
BTS fans rally for Korean adoptees
K-pop megaband BTS is back from military service, and their international fandom — long known for its progressive activism — is celebrating by rallying behind a cause: adoptees from South Korea. Now Asia's fourth-largest economy and a global cultural powerhouse, the idols' native South Korea remains one of the biggest exporters of adopted babies in the world, having sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999. The country only recently acknowledged, after years of activism by adult adoptees, that the government was responsible for abuse in some such adoptions of local children, including record fabrication and inadequate consent from birth parents. The septet's fandom, dubbed ARMY, is known for backing causes like Black Lives Matter and ARMY4Palestine, and launched the #ReuniteWithBTS fundraising project last week to support Korean adoptees seeking to reconnect with or learn about their birth families, which can be a painful and legally tricky process. Almost all of BTS members have completed South Korea's mandatory military service, required of all men due to the country's military tensions with North Korea. "We are celebrating both the reunion of BTS and ARMY, and BTS members being able to reunite with their own family and friends," the BTS fan group behind the initiative, One In An ARMY, told AFP. "Helping international adoptees reunite with their birth country, culture, customs and families seemed like the perfect cause to support during this time." The fans are supporting KoRoot, a Seoul-based organisation that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families and which played a key role in pushing for the government to recognise adoption-related abuses. Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, told AFP it was "very touching" that the BTS fans had taken up the cause, even though "they're not even adoptees themselves". For many adoptees, seeing Korean stars in mainstream media has been a way for them to find "comfort, joy, and a sense of pride" in the roots that they were cut off from, KoRoot's leader Kim Do-hyun added. Soft power BTS, who have discussed anti-Asian hate crimes at the White House and spoken candidly about mental health, have long been considered one of the best examples of South Korea's soft power reach. For years, Korean adoptees — many of whom were adopted by white families globally — have advocated for their rights and spoken out about encountering racism in their host countries. Some adoptees, such as the high-profile case of Adam Crapser, were later deported to South Korea as adults because their American parents never secured their US citizenship. Many international adoptees feel their immigration experience has been "fraught", Keung Yoon Bae, a Korean studies professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, told AFP. Some adoptees have found that, like Crapser, their guardians failed to complete the necessary paperwork to make them legal, she said. This is becoming a particular problem under US President Donald Trump, who is pushing a sweeping crackdown on purported illegal immigrants. Bae said it was possible that "'accidentally illegal' adoptee immigrants may fall further through the cracks, and their deeply unfortunate circumstances left unremedied". The whale Reunions between Korean adoptees and their birth families can be emotionally complex, as Kara Bos — who grew up in the United States — experienced firsthand when she met her biological father through a landmark paternity lawsuit. During their encounter in Seoul in 2020, he refused to remove his hat, sunglasses, or mask, declined to look at her childhood photos and offered no information about her mother. He died around six months later. "The journey of birth family searching is very lonely, difficult, and costly. Many adoptees do not even have the means to return to their birth country let alone fund a family search," Bos, 44, told AFP. To have BTS fans rally around adoptees and provide help with this complex process is "a wonderful opportunity", she said. For Malene Vestergaard, a 42-year-old Korean adoptee and BTS fan in Denmark, the group's song "Whalien 52", which references a whale species whose calls go unheard by others, deeply resonated with her. "I personally sometimes feel like that whale. Being amongst my peers, but they will never be able to truly understand what my adoption has done to me," she told AFP. "For me, finding BTS at the same time I started looking for my birth family and the truth about my adoption and my falsified papers, was such a comfort." Vestergaard said the grief woven into her adoption would never go away, but that "BTS and their lyrics have made it easier to reconcile with that truth".
Kuwait Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Kuwait Times
Soft power: BTS fans rally behind Korean international adoptees
K-pop megaband BTS is back from military service, and their international fandom - long known for its progressive activism - is celebrating by rallying behind a cause: adoptees from South Korea. Now Asia's fourth-largest economy and a global cultural powerhouse, the idols' native South Korea remains one of the biggest exporters of adopted babies in the world, having sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999. The country only recently acknowledged, after years of activism by adult adoptees, that the government was responsible for abuse in some such adoptions of local children, including record fabrication and inadequate consent from birth parents. The septet's fandom, dubbed ARMY, is known for backing causes like Black Lives Matter and ARMY4Palestine, and launched the #ReuniteWithBTS fundraising project last week to support Korean adoptees seeking to reconnect with or learn about their birth families, which can be a painful and legally tricky process. Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, pointing to a screen showing the #ReuniteWithBTS fundraising campaign on Facebook. Almost all of BTS members have completed South Korea's mandatory military service, required of all men due to the country's military tensions with North Korea. 'We are celebrating both the reunion of BTS and ARMY, and BTS members being able to reunite with their own family and friends,' the BTS fan group behind the initiative, One In An ARMY, told AFP. 'Helping international adoptees reunite with their birth country, culture, customs and families seemed like the perfect cause to support during this time.' The fans are supporting KoRoot, a Seoul-based organization that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families and which played a key role in pushing for the government to recognize adoption-related abuses. Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, told AFP it was 'very touching' that the BTS fans had taken up the cause, even though 'they're not even adoptees themselves'. For many adoptees, seeing Korean stars in mainstream media has been a way for them to find 'comfort, joy, and a sense of pride' in the roots that they were cut off from, KoRoot's leader Kim Do-hyun added. Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, posing for a photo after an interview with AFP at KoRoot.--AFP photos Soft power BTS, who have discussed anti-Asian hate crimes at the White House and spoken candidly about mental health, have long been considered one of the best examples of South Korea's soft power reach. For years, Korean adoptees - many of whom were adopted by white families globally - have advocated for their rights and spoken out about encountering racism in their host countries. Some adoptees, such as the high-profile case of Adam Crapser, were later deported to South Korea as adults because their American parents never secured their US citizenship. Many international adoptees feel their immigration experience has been 'fraught', Keung Yoon Bae, a Korean studies professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, told AFP. Some adoptees have found that, like Crapser, their guardians failed to complete the necessary paperwork to make them legal, she said. This is becoming a particular problem under US President Donald Trump, who is pushing a sweeping crackdown on purported illegal immigrants. Bae said it was possible that ''accidentally illegal' adoptee immigrants may fall further through the cracks, and their deeply unfortunate circumstances left unremedied'. A general view of the sign of KoRoot, a Seoul-based organization that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families, at its house in Seoul. The whale Reunions between Korean adoptees and their birth families can be emotionally complex, as Kara Bos - who grew up in the United States - experienced firsthand when she met her biological father through a landmark paternity lawsuit. During their encounter in Seoul in 2020, he refused to remove his hat, sunglasses, or mask, declined to look at her childhood photos and offered no information about her mother. He died around six months later. 'The journey of birth family searching is very lonely, difficult, and costly. Many adoptees do not even have the means to return to their birth country let alone fund a family search,' Bos, 44, told AFP. To have BTS fans rally around adoptees and provide help with this complex process is 'a wonderful opportunity', she said. For Malene Vestergaard, a 42-year-old Korean adoptee and BTS fan in Denmark, the group's song 'Whalien 52', which references a whale species whose calls go unheard by others, deeply resonated with her. 'I personally sometimes feel like that whale. Being amongst my peers, but they will never be able to truly understand what my adoption has done to me,' she told AFP. 'For me, finding BTS at the same time I started looking for my birth family and the truth about my adoption and my falsified papers, was such a comfort.' Vestergaard said the grief woven into her adoption would never go away, but that 'BTS and their lyrics have made it easier to reconcile with that truth'. - AFP
Campaign ME
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Campaign ME
K-pop star takes lashes on a ride in the latest Maybelline campaign
Maybelline New York has launched a new campaign across the APAC region featuring Chinese singer NingNing, a member of K-pop group aespa, as its new Asia brand ambassador. Dubai-based post-production house Singularity UAE was brought on board to lead the visual execution for the campaign film, building a stylised version of New York with a pink roller coaster running through the city. The metaphor – 'take lashes on a ride' – supports the promotion of Maybelline's Sky High Mascara and aims to capture both product energy and a sense of visual spectacle. The film was shot entirely in green screen and directed by Melody Maker. It was produced by Fresh Films London, with creative led by Gotham New York and support from Seoul-based service company Amazing People. With vibrant textures, dynamic movement and pop-forward art direction, the film blends music video sensibilities with cosmetic brand storytelling. Fast-paced VFX and camera trickery drive the high-energy aesthetic, while the pink roller coaster and stylised cityscape add a layer of visual metaphor. Built entirely from green screen footage enhanced by hyper-real CGI, the spot delivers a polished and playful take on a familiar urban backdrop. Post-production was handled entirely by Singularity UAE, who delivered the final creative in coordination with multiple stakeholders across time zones. 'A global campaign of this scale demands a custom-built workflow,' said Zubin Mistry, Founder and Executive Producer at Singularity. 'Our team worked across five time zones, coordinating creative reviews, online sessions and ensuring a flawless delivery process.' Marking Maybelline's first collaboration with NingNing, the campaign was rolled out in mid-2025 and is currently running across digital, out-of-home screens and activations in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and other countries in the region. For Singularity, the project is part of a growing slate of international work highlighting the UAE's capabilities in high-end post-production and global campaign delivery. Credits Client: Maybelline New York Creative agency: Gotham New York Director: Melody Maker Production company: Fresh Films London Service production: Amazing People Post-production: Singularity UAE
