Speaking out to break the information barrier inside the North Korean dictatorship is in itself nothing new, and usually quickly forgotten. North Korean exiles, friendly governments, and humanitarian organisations periodically raise the oft-forsaken banner of human rights, only to be confronted by realpolitik through another round of North Korean missile launches or nuclear proliferation.
Now, for the first time, the whole UN General Assembly held a high-level plenary meeting focused exclusively on human rights abuses in the quaintly titled Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), aka North Korea. The session featured recent North Korean escapees, reports from human rights monitors, and national delegations.
For generations, the Korean people have been arbitrarily divided into a South/North separation. Just three years after the end of World War II, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin selected Kim Il-sung, a minor anti-Japanese resistance leader, to be the supreme leader of North Korea. That was in 1948. His family has ruled there ever since, in a bizarre Marxist dynasty form, unseen anywhere in the world.
Elizabeth Salmon, the UN's Special Representative for Human Rights in North Korea, stated: "For over five years, people in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea have been living in absolute isolation. The government's excessive measures, placed during the Covid-19 pandemic, worsened an already dire human rights situation in the country."
She added, "While isolating itself from most of the external world, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has admitted that they have deployed its soldiers to the Russia-Ukraine conflict…The serious human rights violations in the DPRK continue and are even worsening in this unprecedented isolation."
The UN's Special Rapporteur warned that the country is "facing the worst humanitarian crisis since the disastrous famine in the late 1990s".
But the highlights of the hearing were two North Korean escapees: Gyuri Kang, 24, who fled North Korea in 2023 aboard a small wooden boat with her mother and aunt, who described how the regime publicly executed people for watching or distributing South Korean dramas.
Ms Kang told delegates, "Three of my friends were publicly executed, two were killed for distributing South Korean dramas. One was just 19 years old."
In 2020, the Pyongyang regime passed the Anti-Reactionary Ideology and Culture Act, imposing harsh penalties, including death, for watching or distributing foreign media.
The other speaker, Eun-joo Kim, who escaped North Korea in 1999 at age 12, recounted an escape with her mother and sister into China, only to be faced with exploitation and human trafficking.
Meanwhile, North Korea's envoy Song Kim strongly condemned the meeting.
A delegate from Lithuania, speaking on behalf of the Baltic states, warned of an entrenched humanitarian crisis paralleling the political crackdowns.
"The prolonged closure of the DPRK's borders by the regime in North Korea has significantly exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis. Food insecurity has reached its gravest level in decades: the World Food Programme estimates that 10.7 million people, more than 40% of the population, are under-nourished."
Japan's UN ambassador Yamazaki Kazuyuki added that the "situation in the DPRK underscored that its human rights violations are also inextricably linked with the building up of its military capabilities, including the pursuit of unlawful WMD and ballistic missile programmes."
Riley Barnes, speaking for the US, stressed, "The suffering of the North Korean people is not incidental, it is systemic, coordinated, methodical, and organised."
Nonetheless, the assembly debate witnessed pushback from Pyongyang's allies, among them Russia, China, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The DPRK remains a dystopian society where social services, food production and free movement are perpetually restricted at the expense of a modernising military state.
Only recently, DPRK dictator Kim Jong-un, the third member of his family to lead the secretive state since 1948, was again accompanied at an official function by his teenage daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who may be being groomed as a possible heir apparent and signifies plans for political continuity in the communist state.
But as the defector Eun-joo Kim pleaded to UN delegates to take action, "Please do not turn away from the innocent lives being lost in North Korea and elsewhere. Silence is complicity."
John J Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of 'Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations; Germany, Korea, China'.