Fears that new policy will leave asylum seekers vulnerable to torture and imprisonment, reports NK News

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Russia and North Korea have agreed on a new deportation agreement on illegal immigrants found to be living in either country.

The agreement, drafted in September, states that anyone found to be without the correct documents will be detained, interviewed and, if they have entered illegally, deported within 30-days. The countries share a small land border on Russia’s far-east Primorsky region.

It also covers the requirements of lawful entry, the process of investigation and the costs associated with individual cases.



The document includes provisions for each state to deny a repatriation request if it believes that the individual would be “subjected to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the death penalty or persecution” upon their return.



Despite these assurances, previous examples of the treatment meted out to North Korean defectors raises concerns that those deported from Russia would be vulnerable to imprisonment, detention and abuse.

The recent UN inquiry into human rights abuses in the DPRK documented cases of North Koreans who were tortured after being deported from Russia, including one who said he had been subject to six months of interrogation and torture and was subsequently sent to a prison camp where the ill treatment continued.

Andrei Lankov, a Russian scholar and specialist in Korean studies at Kookmin University in Seoul, described the agreement as “very ugly”.



“Essentially, Russia is taking the obligation to extradite the North Korean refugees to the North, albeit (that) there are some caveats which can be used to get around these obligations,” he said.

However, Leonid Petrov of the Australian National University described it as: “a purely technical document prescribing the process of extradition of illegal entrants and residents of both countries between the (Russian Federation) and DPRK.”

While the majority of North Korean asylum seekers escape into China, defectors have also sought refuge in Russia.

China has also been criticised by the UN for its policy of sending North Korean refugees back. China’s memorandum of understanding means that they can return unregistered North Koreans deeming them to be “economic migrants” rather than refugees.

The new Russia – North Korea agreement is one in a series drawn up this year extending the two countries’ cooperation on cross-border governance and visa reform.



• This article was amended on 25 November 2014 to make it clear that while North Korea and Russia have drafted a bilateral illegal immigration agreement, it has not yet been signed. The error was caused by a misreading of a government order on the immigration agreement, which was signed on 2 September by the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. The order authorised and instructed the Russian Federal Migration Service to conclude the agreement on the government’s behalf, but this has not yet been done