U.N. to probe North`s wartime kidnapping of S. Koreans

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Human Rights in the Democratic People`s Republic of Korea (North Korea) has decided to include into a report on the North`s dire human rights situation Pyongyang`s premeditated abduction of South Korean citizens during the 1950-1953 Korean War. The COI plans to submit the report to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Kim Tae-hoon, the head of a South Korean lawyers` association for human rights on the Korean Peninsula, said that he had met with Siobhan Hobbs, a COI official in charge of investigations into enforced disappearances, during his visits on 18 – 20 November to the COI in Geneva Switzerland and the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands. "The COI official told me that the panel took the wartime abduction issue seriously and decided to include it in the final report due next year," Kim told reporters Friday.

A senior ICC official said that the panel will conduct an in-depth review of the lawyers group`s argument that the logic of a "continuing crime" can be applied to the wartime abduction cases, Kim added.

On Wednesday, the lawyers` association and a group of the families of South Koreans kidnapped by the North during the war filed a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over the wartime abductions.

The issue of the North`s post-war abductions of South Koreans were raised several times in the international community, while the wartime kidnapping issue has received relatively less attention. The victims` families group estimates that some 100,000 South Koreans were abducted by the North during the Korean War.