Monthly Archives: January 2015

SEOUL North Korea has seized upon recent admissions by Shin Dong-hyuk, the prison camp escapee who now says parts of his harrowing tale were inaccurate, to pillory the international movement to condemn the totalitarian states human rights abuses.

Kim Jong Uns regime is seeking to capitalize on the admission and dismiss all human rights efforts against it. But human rights advocates say that Shin is just one of hundreds of defectors from North Korea who have together painted a collective picture of brutal treatment at the hands of the regime.

Now that Shin had changed his story, all data on North Koreas human rights and related reports must be nullified, and plots on human rights must be stopped, said Uriminzokkiri, a Web site with close ties to the North Korean regime that often acts as a mouthpiece for it.

Anti-republic human rights liars should feel embarrassed and repent their crimes, the Web site said Tuesday in article entitled Lies and plots are bound to be revealed.

Shin became internationally renowned for his tale of life and escape from Camp 14, a brutal total control political prison in the mountains north of Pyongyang. His story was the subject of Escape from Camp 14, a best-selling book by former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden, and Shin was a star witness at the U.N. commission of inquiry into North Koreas human rights abuses.

The commissions report with its details of torture, infanticide, executions and brainwashing became the impetus for an international campaign to indict North Koreas leaders for crimes against humanity.

But last Friday, Shin admitted to Harden that he had changed the times and places of some events in his telling of the story, although he insisted the worst parts such as the torture, for which he bears the scars remained true.

North Korea has been alarmed at the mounting campaign against it and particularly at the prospect of Kim Jong Un, the states third-generation leader, being personally named in any referral to the International Criminal Court. It had launched its own counter-campaign, publishing its own human rights report and releasing videos calling Shin a liar.

With Tuesdays statement on Uriminzokkiri, it has stepped up those efforts.

Calling Shin human garbage, the Web site said that it wasnt parts of his story that were wrong, but that all of it was lies and based on fabrication.

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North Korea calls for human rights campaign to be dropped

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) -- The UN post-2015 agenda will focus on common security, development and human rights, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said here on Monday.

The new universal compact will be people-centered and also planet-sensitive, Ban said at the opening ceremony of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) informal session on the sidelines of intergovernmental negotiations on the future agenda.

"Member states want an ambitious agenda that can end poverty, achieve shared prosperity and peace, allow us to live in harmony with our environment and leave no one behind," he stressed.

The three-day session is underway for countries to exchange views on the components that the post-2015 agenda should contain.

At the opening ceremony, UNGA President Sam Kutesa urged the international community to spare no effort to support countries in their final push to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or come as close as possible to doing so.

"Building on the foundation and valuable legacy of the MDGs, the new development agenda will provide a framework for development and international cooperation for the next 15 years," he said.

The MDGs, a set of anti-poverty goals, was adopted as a UNGA resolution in September 2000, with a deadline of 2015. The goals include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, combating HIV/AIDS, and ensuring environmental sustainability.

According to the UN schedule, the post-2015 agenda is to be approved in September this year.

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UN post-2015 agenda to focus on security, development, human rights

Over the past two years, many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have pushed for sexual and reproductive health and rights to be included in the U.N. post-2015 agenda. This wording has generally been understood to represent a push for abortion rights. But it was not openly recognized until Friday, at the Stakeholder Forum in New York, that this wording also included LGBTQ rights (the moderator, Alanieta Vakatale of the Pacific Islands Association, added the Q).

The speaker was Ambassador Peter Wilson, deputy permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations. His statement was in response to a question from a representative of the International Gay and Human Rights Commission, over the problems that could occur from disaggregated data that keep track of members of the LGBT community and could lead to criminalization, stigma and stereotypes in our communities.

I think this is clearly a really important question, said Wilson. My country is deeply, deeply committed to making sure that a rights-based approach is part of this. The way we are feeding that into the post-2015 agenda is on sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Other speakers also focused on the need to separate sexual health and rights. Irene Kagoya, from Akina Mama Wa Afrika and representing the Womens Major Group, claimed the right to control our own bodies and the need for full realization of sexual rights. She urged the U.N. to promote comprehensive sexuality education to allow young people to make their own decisions.

We would also like to emphasize that sexual and reproductive rights are human rights, Kagoya said. If we cannot control our own bodies, sexualities and fertilities, we cannot exercise any of our other civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights.

Kagoya's comments echoed a statement produced in November 2014 at the Asia Pacific Beijing+20 Civil Society Forum. This meeting was in preparation for the official Beijing+20 meetings to be held at the U.N. in March, commemorating the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action created in 1995.

The Asia Pacific document said that women with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities are the most likely to experience marginalisation and a denial of their human rights and The single greatest barrier to the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action is the lack of binding, meaningful accountability mechanisms.

Interestingly, the accountability mechanisms brought up this subject at the Stakeholder Forum, as the LGBT community was opposed to having LGBT members identified, for fear of creating criminalization, stigma and stereotypes.

The Asia Pacific Forum also requested governments to review and remove laws and policies that discriminate and/or criminalize sex workers and people who use drugs.

On the reproductive side of the issues, the Asia Pacific Forum requested governments to provide reproductive health information and services, including safe and legal abortion, provided through the public sector, without any form of stigma, discrimination, coercion or violence.

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Susan Roylance: NGOs call for sexual rights in UN post-2015 agenda

PYONGYANG, North Korea, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- North Korea demanded a stop to international pressure on its human rights record Tuesday, after a celebrated defector partially retracted his claims.

The defector and star witness at a United Nations inquiry into North Korea's human rights abuses, Shin Dong-hyuk, 32, admitted some parts of his tale of life in a North Korean prison were incorrect. Over the weekend he admitted to Blaine Harden, author of the book "Escape from Camp 14," that although episodes of torture and other elements of his story were true, some of the details, including dates and places of some experiences, were not.

Escapees from North Korea have painted a harrowing picture of life in prison camps there, and an exhaustive United Nations Human Rights Commission report recommend a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the country.

The website Uriminzokkiri, which has close ties to North Korean government, commented Tuesday, "All data on North Korea's human rights and related reports must be nullified, and plots on human rights... must be stopped. Anti-republic human rights liars should feel embarrassed and repent their crimes. It's not 'parts' of his story that are untrue. Everything he said and the things the so-called 'defectors' said and submitted to their American boss and the United Nations Human Rights Commission are all lies, woven with trickery."

Although it is unlikely the global movement to condemn North Korea's human rights abuses, including the possibility the International Criminal Court will take up the matter, will stop, the North Korean regime is seizing on Shin's admissions to persuade world opinion that information on torture and hardship at prison camps is untrue.

Shin's admissions should not stall or interrupt momentum to hold North Korea liable for abuses, Michael Kirbyy, the Australian judge who led the U.N. commission of inquiry and wrote its report, told the Washington Post Tuesday.

"It's a trivial issue. This is a traumatized person and the fact that he misstated some things is not at all surprising. This is one witness out of 300. His name is in the report only a couple of times, and North Korea should not get away with riding on the back of this disproportionate coverage.

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North Korea calls for end to human rights campaign

This is a guest post by director ofSheffield Robotics Tony Prescott. Prescott, who is also professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sheffield and a fellow of the British Psychological Society, researches the development of biomimetic robots, assistive robots, and human-robot interaction. He is also collaborating on building a companion robot and an intelligent robotic table. You can follow him at @tonyjprescott

It is good to see more attention being paid to the ongoing change in UK population demographics. The number of people aged 60 or over will pass 20 million by 2030. The number of people aged 65 or over will also have risen 50 percent by that year. We need to get organised to deal with the consequences of this dramatic shift. The 2013 "Ready for Ageing?" report by the House of Lords gave us a stark warning: "The UK population is ageing rapidly, but we have concluded that the government and our society are woefully underprepared".

In response to the Lords' report, The Guardian newspaper is organising an event on 5 Marchwhere we can expect to hear from all of the major political parties about their policies for coping with the UK's ageing population. It will be interesting to see what they each have to say.

I will be particularly interested to see if the politicians have anything to say about developing new technologies that could help us as we age. The Lords report is rather cautious on this topic, focusing on what we can do now in terms of telehealth and monitoring: "fire alarms, movement sensors, alarm pendants, temperature alerts and programmes to manage complex medication regimes." This list doesn't even begin to take into account many of the assistive technologies already in development, never mind those we might have by 2030. Their lordships seem to be have imagined a future UK much like it is today. However, look back 20 years and the internet age had barely started -- look forward, and who knows what life-changing technologies we might have around us?

I know that many people are sceptical about the possible use of robots in care, and perhaps fear being left to age in the hands of robots. These are genuine concerns, but they are also fed by the idea of robots that we get from science fiction rather than by first-hand experience of robots. So put aside the idea of robots that we get from movies and TV and look at what real robots are actually like.

I'd like to clear one thing up right away. An assistive robot doesn't have to look like person. To be useful, robots do not have to be at all human-like, and it's probably better if they are not. Human-like robots struggle to avoid being uncanny and their substantial bulk would make them impractical and hazardous for use in people's homes. In fact, useful non-humanoid assistive robots are already here -- you may not even think of them as robots. Keeping your house clean is one of the many tasks that get harder as you grow old. But for a few hundred pounds, you can already buy a small robot that does the job of vacuuming your floor. By 2030, cleaning robots will be part of a larger ecology of smart devices that will have transformed the way we perform household tasks, making our living spaces easier to manage as we grow old. We can see the seeds of this now, but there is much more to come. In research labs around the world, robots are being developed to perform household chores like washing, cleaning, tidying, preparing and serving food.

For older people with disabilities, robots also have the potential to assist with those aspects of care that require direct physical intervention. These include help with moving around (e.g. from sitting to standing), eating and drinking, dressing, and toileting. The goal is not to replace all human help -- we will always want human-to-human social and physical contact to be a part of our lives. However, we will also want privacy and control. These kinds of robotic appliances will allow people to regain control over their daily routines, they will preserve dignity and enhance independence.

Carers spend much of their time addressing people's physical needs and thus cannot always prioritise social need, even though having a social connection is fundamental to human nature. Robots can help here too. Paro is an animal-like robot, resembling a baby arctic seal, that has large eyes, artificial fur, orients to sounds, and responds to gentle stroking by waving its paws and tail. This artificial pet is proving to be an effective aid for people with Alzheimer's Disease for use in settings such as hospital wards, where keeping a living animal would be impractical. Two of Paro's most useful functions are its capacity to calm patients who are distressed, and to encourage people to talk to one another by giving them something to talk about. Whereas Paro makes only animal sounds, Jibo is a table-top companion robot, currently under development, that can hold a simple, practical conversation and can perform tasks such as managing messages and organising a daily schedule. This kind of functionality should be useful to an older person experiencing memory problems.

Social robots will become more sophisticated and engaging with time, but they won't be able to converse like other people any time soon so there is no reason to think that they will replace human companionship.

One 2010 study forecast that annual UK public expenditure on long-term care will increase from around 12 billion to 31 billion by 2032; that's almost a threefold increase. The cost of care escalates as those who need it move from their own homes, into residential care, and then into hospital. Older people prefer their own homes, suggesting a win-win scenario -- both an economic and a welfare benefit from developing new technologies that allow people to age in place.

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From seal pup pets to cleaners: how robots will help us age