'Walk Free's Dubious Case Against the DPRK
Debunking the Walk Free 2023 Global Slavery Index that puts the DPRK above Eritrea for the worst modern slavery offender
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The latest report from Walk Free Foundation, a prominent human rights organization, has stirred controversy with its claims of modern slavery in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Ranking DPRK as the worst offender, the report has sparked a contentious debate over its reliability and the validity of its sources. Walk Free's heavy reliance on debunked testimonies from defectors and reports from think tanks, some of which are known to receive funding from intelligence agencies like the CIA, raises significant concerns about the report's objectivity and evidentiary basis. Given the high stakes of these accusations and the profound geopolitical implications they carry, it becomes crucial to critically examine Walk Free's claims and the methodology that underpins them. The veracity of the modern slavery narrative against DPRK hinges not only on the integrity of the report but also on the credibility and impartiality of its sources.
Modern slavery most common in North Korea, Eritrea, report says
Rights group Walk Free says up to 50 million people worldwide were experiencing forced labour or forced marriage in 2021.
Here’s an Al Jazeera article about it. Funnily enough, I actually sourced Walk Free in my article about slave labour in Canada. Is it hypocritical for me to source them in one of my articles and debunk them in another? Nope. Because Walk Free’s reporting on Canada is based on actual evidence. Tangible, demonstrable evidence. But (spoiler alert) their reporting on the DPRK and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has no proof and no academic rigour. Let’s dive in.
From the Al Jazeera article:
By this benchmark, reclusive and authoritarian North Korea has the highest prevalence of modern slavery (104.6 per 1,000 population), according to the report.
Reclusive? Yes, the DPRK definitely is. Authoritarian? Nope. ‘Authoritarian’ is a meaningless buzzword used by western critics of communism/socialism, just like ‘totalitarian’ and ‘autocratic’. These terms all equally apply to any capitalist country. Every country on earth has strict authority. No country on earth has ‘freedom’. They can’t, and never will. The nonsensical tactics that the West uses to discredit AES (Actually Existing Socialist) countries don’t inspire quite enough fear on their own, so they make up new terms to try to make China and north Korea sound scarier.
The DPRK is a democratic nation. I would argue they are far more democratic than any capitalist country, with much more stringent worker protections. They don’t practice modern slavery. The CIA desperately wants to make you think they do, though. The fact that the DPRK is ‘reclusive’ means its enemies, mainly the US, can make up essentially anything they want to discredit the DPRK’s system of governance without it being easily disproven by those living there. They always cite ‘anonymous sources in the country’ and most Western liberals eat it up for some reason. They pay or coerce defectors to lie about what life is like in the DPRK, and even though many, if not most, are eventually proven to be lying, it is still taken as fact in the West.
To get an idea of what life is actually like in the DPRK, watch ‘My Brothers and Sisters in the North’:
To understand how the defector industry works to produce anti-DPRK propaganda, watch ‘Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul’:
Aside from Al Jazeera’s intro paragraph, that little snippet above is the only time in the article that the DPRK is mentioned. Yet, they’re prominent in the headline. Why is that? Well, it’s because anti-DPRK news gets clicks, and Al Jazeera and Walk Free both know this very well. I guess we’re done with Al Jazeera, so let’s move on to the actual Walk Free report.
2023 Global Slavery Index - Walk Free
They have a fancy little splash page for the report, but you have to dig through to find the actual meat of it in PDF form. We’ll get to that in a bit.
The report makes an extremely dubious claim of almost 2.7 million DPRK residents being slaves. That’s slightly over ten percent of the population. One in ten. They also claim that the DPRK has the worst government response to slavery conditions. It’s somehow in the negatives, at -2.6, while every other country including Eritrea is a positive number. That seemingly implies that the government furthers slavery? I guess we’ll find out.
Interestingly, the US is reported to have over a million people in modern slavery, which is over a third of what Walk Free (once again, dubiously) claims about the DPRK. But of course, the US has over 10x the population of the DPRK. The splash page for this report doesn’t say much about the DPRK oddly enough, you have to dig in to a different web page for each category (Forced and Child Marriage, State Imposed Forced Labour, etc.) to find specifics. But we’ll just hit up the full report link (PDF warning) at the very bottom of the page instead of clamouring around this website.
It’s a 172 page report, I hit CTRL-F and found 78 mentions for ‘North Korea’. Here’s the first one with some substance to it:
In North Korea, one in 10 people are in modern slavery, with the vast majority being forced to work by the state. This is a conservative estimate in a country that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights found engages in widespread and systematic abuses such as torture, wrongful imprisonment, and forced labour against its citizens. 5
This is a conservative estimate‽ Excuse me?
There is a footnote for this claim, it links to a 2014 UN Human Rights Council ‘Report of the commission of inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’. Here’s the methodology of that report:
B. Methods of work
12. Owing to its lack of access to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the commission obtained first-hand testimony through public hearings that were transparent, observed due process and protected victims and witnesses. More than 80 witnesses and experts testified publicly and provided information of great specificity, detail and relevance, in ways that often required a significant degree of courage.
It’s…. defector testimony. That’s it. It’s spoken or written accounts from defectors. That’s what this claim is based on. At the bottom of this page in the footnote it says, “Video recordings and transcripts from all the public hearings are available on the website of the commission of inquiry”. The website link goes to a 404 page. I found it through the Wayback Machine.
I clicked on the very first public hearing. The main speaker in that hearing was…
Mr. Shin Dong Hyuk (political prison camps) [12:36-02:11:30]
That name might sound familiar to you if you actually clicked on some of the many links in this article. Side note, did you know that Substack tracks the links my readers click? And none of you seem to click any? I guess you trust me enough to not need to verify my assertions?
The Guardian article I linked above is specifically about Shin Dong Hyuk. About a year or so after this hearing, Shin recanted most of his story. The DPRK had released a video of his father revealing that Shin was lying about being born in a ‘camp’, and Shin revised his accounts because he was ashamed of being caught lying. Not before a bestselling novel was released about his story, though. Don’t worry, the propagandist author who transcribed that story says he is “working with [his] publisher to gather more information and amend the book”. That was 8 years ago. Maybe he’ll get to it someday?
Oh, by the way, I have a copy of that book. Don’t worry, I bought it used at a thrift store for cheap; I didn’t give these scumsuckers any of my money. I went through the citations in the back and highlighted all of the ones that were connected directly or indirectly to the US government. It lit up like a Christmas tree.
According to the timestamp of his testimony, Shin lied to the UN commission for nearly 2 hours. So, to sum it up, the UN based their report entirely on defector testimony, which we now know is notoriously unreliable, and Walk Free still cited that report and presented it as proof. I think we know where the rest of this Walk Free report will take us. Nowhere fun. Just sad, pathetic, ‘red scare’ territory.
There are also reports of North Korean women being lured or coerced into leaving the country to be sold as brides in China. Women who escape from those situations and return to North Korea often face punishment by the authorities rather than receiving support as victims of bride trafficking. 6
This is immediately after that last bit in the Walk Free report. The footnote goes to a report in the Journal of Trafficking. This report also seems to entirely rely on defector testimony. Interestingly, though, it’s mostly about North Korean defectors being trafficked in China, not in the DPRK. I found this little blurb in the report, though:
She also received threats to her life and with being reported to the Chinese authorities (which would have led to her being deported back to North Korea, to face serious punishment for ‘defection,’ including torture, imprisonment, sexual violence, forced labor and even death; Yoon, 2021)
Despite being based entirely on testimony and not tangible evidence, the report makes a bold claim here. The footnote for this claim links to a Human Rights Watch(HRW) article, here is an excerpt:
Concerns among relatives spiked last week when Chinese authorities forcibly returned nearly 50 North Korean refugees who now face torture, imprisonment, sexual violence, and forced labor.
HRW’s source for this article is… CIA-operated Radio Free Asia(RFA). I left the link intact in the quote there. As with all RFA articles, their source is anonymous, totally real people:
China has repatriated about 50 North Korean escapees, including air force pilots and others who could face severe punishment including the death penalty, sources on the Chinese side of the border told RFA.
The first such repatriations since Beijing and Pyongyang closed their borders in January 2020 at the start of the pandemic took place on July 14 at the northwestern border city of Sinuiju, across the Yalu River border from China’s Dandong, a source in the city told RFA. [emphasis added]
These anonymous fake people are only used as ‘proof’ that China was sending North Korean defectors back to the DPRK. The claims of torture and violence or whatever against them is further down in the RFA article:
A U.S. Department of State spokesperson told RFA that Washington was “deeply concerned” about the North Korean asylum seeker situation.
“North Koreans who are forcibly repatriated are commonly subjected to torture, arbitrary detention, summary execution, forced abortion, and other forms of sexual violence. We are particularly concerned by recent reports that nearly 50 North Koreans were forcibly repatriated,” the spokesperson said. [emphasis added]
They don’t even name the US government stooge. Does this one exist? Shouldn’t be hard to find an American government propagandist to make this claim. They wouldn’t have to hide their identity.
But, once again, Walk Free’s report has sourced another report based on defector testimony, which makes a bold claim that they back up with an anonymous US Government worker sourced from a CIA-operated propaganda rag. Yikes. Let’s move on.
I skipped around a bit more in this Walk Free report while finding all the references to the DPRK. This one stood out:
While noting a lack of recent and available data in some countries such as China and North Korea, the US has the world’s largest rate of imprisonment, therefore the risk of state-imposed forced labour is particularly concerning. 21
This is about the US’ use of slave labour for prisoners. The proof of this prison slave labour is remarkable and undeniable. It’s pure data, no testimony. Yet, Walk Free still tries to dig at the DPRK and the PRC by claiming they might have more prisoners than the US that we just don’t know about because of a lack of available data:
For some jurisdictions assessed by the World Prison Brief, data is not available for certain categories of prisoner, for example, those detained prior to trial or sentencing in China. No data is available for Eritrea, North Korea, or Somalia.
Did you catch that self report, though? You can’t say for certain how many prisoners are in the DPRK and PRC because of a lack of data. But you can claim that the DPRK has the most prevalence of slave labour in the entire world with that same lack of data? Smells like confirmation bias in here.
Despite having 25% of the world’s prisoners with only 4% of the world’s total population as well as a constitutional amendment that allows slavery for prisoners, the US doesn’t even crack the top 100 worst offenders for some reason. From that alone, we can reach a conclusion about the veracity of this reporting. But we’ll continue on anyways.
Here we go, pages 52 and 53 of the Walk Free report are dedicated entirely to ‘State-imposed forced labour’ in the DPRK. This should be good.
North Korea’s ostensibly socialist system is upheld by widespread state-imposed forced labour of citizens.63
There’s 4 different sources in this footnote. The first is to one of Walk Free’s own reports. We’ll get to that. The second is to another UN Human Rights Council report, this one from 2021. This report cites the UN 2014 report that we already know is based on (disproven and retracted) defector testimony, and this newer report is also, of course, based solely off of defector testimony. It doesn’t even come to a firm conclusion, anyways:
V. Conclusions
68. Analysis of available information continues to confirm that there are reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed and may be ongoing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“Reasonable grounds to believe” is code for “zero tangible evidence but some random people were paid or coerced to say it happened”.
The third link in that Walk Free footnote goes to another Human Rights Watch report title ‘North Korea Events of 2020’. This is a fun one. I’ve done a breakdown of this report before. The COVID-19 section (relevant, considering this report is about the Events of 2020 of which COVID took center stage) directly sources Radio Free Asia three times and the DailyNK four times. The DailyNK is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (US Congress) and spreads plenty of propaganda about the DPRK, using anonymous sources just like RFA. That’s just the COVID 19 section, one portion of the report.
The claim that Walk Free is trying to prove with this HRW report isn’t about COVID-19, though. It’s about state-imposed forced labour. The ‘Forced Labour’ section of the HRW report links to two other HRW reports. Both of them link to that 2014 UN report which (I feel like a broken record here) uses false, retracted defector testimony.
This is a common thing that I find while breaking down these sources. They just link back and forth to each other neverendingly. There is no tangible evidence for any of the West’s allegations about the DPRK, so they pick one (flawed) source from an ‘unbiased’ organization like the UN and then hide it through multiple layers of citations.
The 4th and final link in that Walk Free footnote goes to the aforementioned Walk Free report, which we will now take a look at. It’s titled, ‘PERVASIVE, PUNITIVE, AND PREDETERMINED: UNDERSTANDING MODERN SLAVERY IN NORTH KOREA’.
This study sheds light on the hidden reality that is forced labour and other forms of modern slavery inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, better known as North Korea. As it is not possible to directly survey or otherwise perform data collection within North Korea, the research findings are based on interviews with 50 defectors from North Korea who are living in South Korea.
…Yeah. More defector testimony. They specifically mention that these defectors live in South Korea. This is important, and you’ll understand why if you’ve watched the ‘Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul’ documentary that I linked at the start of this article. In it, a lawyer who works with defectors in South Korea explains the process that the defectors go through when they enter South Korea.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), which was modelled after the US CIA (it literally used to be called the KCIA), imprisons the defectors for weeks and brutally interrogates them. After being browbeaten for long enough, the defectors typically give up and provide the NIS the information that it wants, whether its true or not, which essentially amounts to ‘North Korea bad’. They’ll ask leading questions like “Another defector told us that [blah blah blah] happens up north, is it true?”
The defectors need to stick with the story they told after they’re released from NIS custody. South Korea refuses to issue them passports, they are trapped in South Korea unless they fully cooperate. South Korea… keeps them as slaves. Ironic.
Taking a look at the footnotes for this Walk Free report, we see the typical US Government funded nonsense. They source ‘The Hidden Gulag’ (PDF warning) from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) several times. The HRNK is headed by Carl Gershman, the President of the National Endowment for Democracy, CIA Agent James R. Lilley, who “worked in Laos to undermine communist insurgency and helped to insert a number of CIA agents into China”, and a smattering of US presidential aides. Very unbiased.
‘The Hidden Gulag’ report features testimony from admitted liar Shin Dong Hyuk as well. Oh, and this Walk Free report directly cites the US Department of State. Fun times.
Alright, that’s one footnote from the two page DPRK spread in the original Walk Free report. The next 5 all cite that same DPRK-specific Walk Free report. Another 4 footnotes from this section also cite the same report, and 2 others cite that 2021 UN Report. So once again, these citations all rely on defector testimony and not tangible evidence, with some good old fashioned US State Department propaganda to ‘back it up’.
What I’m confused about, and what I can’t seem to find an answer for in the Walk Free report, is the source of the claim that there are specifically 2,696,000 North Korean slaves. It’s an estimate, but why is it so exact? Why not 27 million, for instance? The report says many times that ‘approximately’ 1 in 10 North Koreans are slaves. But, it lists the population of North Korea as 25,779,000. Exactly ten percent of that would be 2,577,900. Where did this number come from and why is it so specific?
Which came first, the ‘Estimated prevalence of modern slavery’ at 104.6 out of 1000, or the ‘Estimated number of people’? If the almost-2.7 million number came from the ‘estimated prevalence’, well, where did that ‘104.6 per 1000’ stat come from?
To find out, we need to check the ‘Methodology’ section of this report.
The estimates of forced labour in the private economy (excluding the sex industry) and forced marriage are derived from 68 nationally representative surveys on forced labour and forced marriage jointly conducted by ILO and Walk Free, and implemented through the Gallup World Poll. During the 2017-2021 period, a total of 77,914 respondents aged 15 years and over were interviewed either face-to-face or by telephone across the 68 survey countries…In the five-year reference period for the estimates, while surveys were conducted in 68 countries, men, women, and children were reported to have been exploited in 129 countries (see Figure 2)
So… it’s from household surveys. They cold call people and ask them a list of questions about slavery. They only surveyed 68 countries, so for information on the other countries in this report they would have asked about people’s relatives from around the world. They obviously didn’t survey the DPRK, but they did survey the ROK, South Korea.
South Koreans have been brainwashed by anti-DPRK propaganda since the Korean War. They watch defectors tell more and more spectacular lies on TV shows like ‘Now On My Way to Meet You’ (once again, watch ‘Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul’ to understand the propaganda at play here).
South Koreans will absolutely tell wild tales about their “friend that lived in the DPRK and saw all kinds of slavery, I promise”. That’s where this number comes from. They use a convoluted equation to determine an estimated prevalence of slavery in all of the countries in this report from these household surveys:
Anyways, is that good enough? Can we dismiss the DPRK parts of this report as pure, ideological propaganda? I think so. That’s the end of this article, subscribe to this Substack to get notified for Part 2, which will cover this report’s propaganda against the People’s Republic of China.