1 . The Right to Life
A. Equality of Man and Woman and Women’s Social Participation
687 deputies for the SPA and 26,650 deputies for the Province, City and County People’s Committees have been elected. It further stated, “Some 99.7 percent of those listed on the eligible voter registry participated in the election and 100 percent of those voting cast “yes” for the candidate nominated by the district.”239
During elections, Security and Safety agents exercise strict control over the people. Whoever does not participate in voting, or refuses to vote, is suspected of political motives and experiences a negative impact on daily lives. For these reasons, new settlers testified, they always participated in voting.240
men.”
Looking simply at current laws and systems, as well as the social participation of North Korean women, it is possible to think that North Korean women are enjoying equal civil and political rights with men, and their social status and roles have seen a significant improvement.241 North Korea has joined the CEDAW convention in February of 2001, and submitted its first progress report on the convention in September of 2002. In the report, North Korea insisted, “Over its long history, North Korea has abolished all discriminations against women. The gender equality in North Korea means more than simple equality between the sexes, it means placing more emphasis on women. And, this concept has been reflected in policies and legislation.”
In practice, however, the status and roles of North Korean women have not improved as much as North Korea claims and the society wide discriminatory attitude stemming from the feudal patriarchal tradition continues to prevail in North Korea. The policies of women’s social participation and socialist reforms in household chores pursued during its founding years were motivated by the class theory and the need to mobilize the labor force for economic growth functions, rather than for the liberation of women. Since the 1970s, North Korea has been emphasizing the importance of family, the paternal hierarchy and patriarchal national hierarchy for political reasons and succession purposes. As a result, there developed an unbridgeable gap between the ideal of women’s liberation and the lives of North Korean women in
241Before the regime’s inception, North Korea enacted the “law concerning the equality of men and women,” and after the inception North Korea tried to guarantee women’s political and social roles by enacting various laws, including the
“constitution,” the “law on children rearing and education,” “socialist labor law,”
and “family laws.” It also sought to encourage women’s social participation and improve their status by abolishing the family registry system, and pursuing institutional reforms such as the socialization of household chores and a national nursery system for children.
reality. In connection with women’s political participation, about 20 percent of the people’s deputies at the Supreme People’s Assembly have been women and 20～30 percent at lower levels of people’s assemblies have been women since the 1970s.242 This level of political participation by women is almost equal to that of countries in the West. The difference is that delegates in North Korea are not elected through free elections, but are instead arbitrarily assigned by the Party due to political considerations.
Furthermore, assembly delegates serve only a symbolic purpose and the delegates do not perform important functions or supervisory roles in the affairs of state. The political power of North Korean women is not as strong as the number of delegates to the Supreme People’s Assembly would suggest. In fact, only a very small number of women are appointed to cabinet positions that offer political and administrative powers and responsibilities. On average, women occupy only 4.5 percent of the more powerful Party’s Central Committee positions. In addition, during the UNHRC review session of North Korea’s second regular report(The second regular report on International Convention on Political and Civil Rights) of July 2001, a North Korean delegate clearly admitted that, in connection with the effort to improve women’s social status “The fact that only 10 percent of our central government officials is women is clearly unsatisfactory in terms of achieving gender equality.” He then promised to consider improvement measures.243 In this connection, North Korea has submitted in September 2002 its first progress report on the CEDAW convention. In the report, North Korea said, “In order to enhance the social status of women, the government has increased the
242In its initial report on the CEDAW Convention, North Korea has reported that in the 1998 general elections for the Supreme People’s Assembly about 20.1% of all the deputies elected were women and that women accounted for 21.9% of all the province, city and county deputies.
243Lee Won woong, “An Observations Report on the UNHRC Review Session on North Korea’s Second Regular Report on Human Rights,” passim.
ratio of women staff in the public sector. For example, the ratio of female judge is 10 percent and diplomat 15 percent.”
In the economic field, however, women’s participation was encouraged in order to fill the woeful shortages of labor that has existed throughout the process of socialist nation-building and postwar reconstruction. During this period, the Party and government organizations arbitrarily assigned most women between the ages of 16～55 to specific posts in accordance with the workforce supply plans of the State Planning Commission. Once assigned to a work site, they were then forced to perform the same kind of work as men on the basis of equality, irrespective of the difficulty or danger factor of the work.
As postwar rehabilitation and collective farm projects progressed and as numerous administrative measures were taken to expand the participation of women in a variety of economic activities, discrimination against women began to emerge in the form of differentiated pay scales and inequality in the types of work. Under the guidelines, men would be assigned to important, complicated, and difficult jobs, while women would be assigned to relatively less important and lower paying jobs. As such, the sexual criteria in employment became more pronounced. As a result, anew phenomenon developed in which women were assigned to special fields where a woman’s touch was required, such as in the light industries, agriculture, commerce, communications, health, culture, and education. According to official North Korean statistics of 2001, the percentage of administrative staff in the health-children-nursery-commerce sector who were female was 70 percent,244 One hundred percent of nurses and 86 percent of school teachers were also women.245 Even though women constitute 50 percent of North Korea’s economically active
244North Korea’s first progress report on the CEDAW convention.
245These were the numbers given by the North Korean delegation to UNHRC during the review process of North Korea’s second report on the implementation of Human Rights Covenant A in Nov. 2003.
population,246 the ratio of women is higher among workers and farmers, the two largest categories of manual labor. For example, some 75 percent of the employees are women at the Pyongyang Textile Factory, which is one of the largest and best-known textile factories in North Korea.
Considering that over 65 percent of all office workers, in the government and elsewhere, are men, the exploitation of women’s labor in North Korea is extremely serious.
The North Korean Democratic Women’s League (“Women’s League”) is an organization in which North Korean women between the ages of 31 and 60, must join if they have no other specific affiliations. But this is not a voluntary organization for the promotion and protection of women’s rights, and it does not exercise any critical or political influences as a social organization. It is simply the party’s external arm charged with responsibilities of mobilizing women for the construction of a socialist economy. Its main task is to perform ideology education of women.