 I would like to argue, though, that the two most important people here today are on this panel, and they are two remarkable and courageous individuals who escaped from North Korea. And we're going to begin our panel hearing from them. We are Mr. Gwang Il-Jung, who was a political prisoner at Camp 15. Since he escaped living in South Korea, he has done a great deal to help get information back into North Korea. And we will also hear from Ms. Soon-Shil Lee. Ms. Lee was a nurse in the North Korean military. She escaped a remarkable 10 times from North Korea until finally being able to make it all the way to South Korea. She was repatriated nine times by China and spent time in detention centers where she was tortured. This will be the first part of our program. The second part of the panel will be a video presentation, some pictures to help keep us awake after lunch. And Joe Bermudez will give us his analysis of some of the video images, the satellite images, pardon me, that he has taken and analyzed from North Korea and explained to us what these satellite images can tell us about human rights in North Korea. And finally, we will have a discussion among the panelists who include Blaine Harden, David Hawk, and Mr. Ki-Hung Han, the president of NKNet. David Hawk is a researcher in human rights and the author of HRNK's report on the hidden gulag. And Blaine is the author of Escape from Camp 14. So let's begin, Mr. Jung. I was the head of a trading company in North Korea and then I was engaged in trading businesses between North Korea and China. In 1999, I was arrested by the North Korea Security Department. When I was arrested, I didn't know why I was arrested. And from the day I was taken to a prison, I was ruthlessly beaten with wooden clubs because of those beatings. All the bottom teeth were fallen out. So I was subject to a lot of torture for three months. And then they forced me to confess that I was a spy. While I was engaged in trading business in China, I directly met with South Korean merchants. That was the problem. And then they told me that I need to make a confession that I was a spy sent from the South Korean National Security Agency. When I was taken and arrested by the North Korean State Security Department, I received a lot of different torture. The most horrendous one was torture known as pigeon torture, in which I was tied and I couldn't sit down or I could not stand up. Because my arms were crossed behind my back, I could not sit down and could not stand up. And I was hung like this for about a week. So I had to take a fate and urinate in my pants as it was. So the living itself was a torture for me. After I was subject to such a torture for 10 months, I gave up. So finally I falsely confessed that I was a spy from South Korea. After making a false confession, I was taken to somewhere else. That place was, later I learned that, the Uda camp, number 15. It was known as a camp, but in North Korea it was known as Kuali Seoul. There were a lot of people detained in that Kuali Seoul. As for myself, I was in China and I had some interactions with the South Korean. So you was recognized as a crime in North Korea. However, when I went to that prison camp, I found out that there were a lot of people who were falsely charged for nothing. At that time, North Korea suffered from the famine. And a lot of people were taken to that prison camp for criticizing the North Korean regime. That's a tongue reactionary. So those people who criticized the regime were arrested and taken to the prison. Once you are taken to the prison, you are subject to horrendous torture. Compared to ordinary criminals, I think I was sentenced for 10 years, but that was the shortest period. Other people were sentenced for a longer period of time, so more than half of the people ended up in that prison. And there was one person who died one week after he was taken to a prison. That shows how horrendous torture was in the prison camp. And there were a lot of horrendous and horrifying human rights abuses in the prison camp. During the summer, we were engaged in the corn farming. There was a work quota that we had to fulfill. If you complete your work quota, then you will be given meals. But if you cannot fulfill the work quota, then you won't be given the food. Because of that, a lot of people suffered from starvation. And the prisoners were treated as sub-human. In the summer, when you were engaged in the corn farming, when you plant corn on the ground, because prisoners were so hungry, sometimes they would steal the corn grains. But because of that, they were given some human faces. And then the corn grains would be mixed with the human faces. But because prisoners were so hungry, they had to pick up the grains out of the human faces. Once they eat those grains out of the human faces, then they would fall sick. And sometimes because of colitis, they would die. And sometimes in order to give us some nutrition, according to their argument, they would give us some food mixed with the human faces. There is no bucket available in the prison. So the security agents would use the bowl of rice to carry or fetch the human faces. So during the daytime, we would use that bowl to contain human faces and use it as a fertilizer for corn farming. And we used exactly the same bowl to eat our meal. During the winter, our work is focused on carrying lumber. Last night, it snowed here, and watching the snow falling down, a lot of those came across into my mind last night. There are a lot of projects and tasks given to work prisoners. And then every day, we were obligated to carry seven timber logs, four meters long. And we had to cut down those tall trees. And then while working on cutting those trees, sometimes a lot of prisoners got an accident. And because of those accidents, they would die. But if you get to die in the winter, you won't be buried under the ground because the ground was frozen. So it's impossible to dig out the ground. So even though people were trying to dig out the ground, it would require at least five and six people to dig out the ground to bury the people. That's why it was not allowed to dig out the ground to bury the people. But there are also people who got injured while working labor in the winter. And those injured people would be taken to a place which is called the collection place of injured people. They didn't die yet. They survived. However, they would suffer from excruciating pain out of their injuries. And then the security agents would wait until the end of March and April. And the people who were gathered in that room would end up in death. So it's hard to distinguish who is who. And they were dead while they were abandoned in that place. And then if they died, then those people would be uploaded in a cart and then they would be thrown away in the field. So what is taking place is beyond our imagination. It's so horrifying and terrifying. I was released in April 2004. I went to the revolutionizing zone of the Yodok camp and I spent three years in that camp. And I was released in April 2004. And I was released in April 2003 and defected to South Korea afterwards. And after I came to South Korea, I was engaged in the activities to defend North Korean human rights. And when I looked at the COI report, I thought a lot of things. And it did not draw a lot of attention until last year. However, now the North Korean regime completely denies what is contained in this report. When the North Korean regime denies all the findings indicated in the COI report, many people including myself were stunned. Some people are questioning the credibility of North Korean defectors. So North Korean defectors including myself would like to raise an issue to the North Korean regime directly. If they are criticizing our accounts as false, then they should conduct their own investigation and ask us questions. Then we would, without any hesitation, answer the questions posed by the North Korean regime. We are so prepared to do so. So we are going to make an official request to the UN Council. And I am so prepared to talk about this in an official setting. Thank you. Thank you very much for your powerful statement. And Ms. Lee, may we now hear from you please? Good afternoon. My name is Lee Soon-sil. It's been eight years since I came to South Korea. And before I came to South Korea, I was a volleyball player from the North Korean military volleyball team. And I also served in the military in Kesung. And in 1993, I also was in part of the arduous march. So I was in the North Korean military. And I was not aware when I was in the North Korean military how dire the situation is in the society. When I came and became a part of the regular North Korean society, I became a beggar, as was with everybody else. And I was sent, repatriated to North Korea. And on the ninth attempt, I was successful in defecting. And I was in Yanggando, Yangsan prison camp. But I'm not really aware of the political prison camp. But I was able to experience in the regular prison camp. There are 27,000 defectors in South Korea. You cannot silence the 27,000. As one of the 27,000 defectors, I am here representing them. Let me talk about Hyesun State Security Department. I think it's a cave of evil people. Because I was starved. Although I was retired from the North Korean military and I was a party member, how could I be a beggar? And how could I be a displaced person? I don't think anybody would have believed that I, who was once a North Korean military, became a beggar. And I was a beggar for 10 years and wandering around as homeless. And Gochebi is what you call a homeless person. I didn't even have any underwear. And I was a beggar. So that's why I went to China. But within an hour, I would be captured and would be sent back to Hyesun State Security Department. When we get there, we have to take off our clothes. And we would be there like their mother, their sisters. But these officials would have sticks and they would threaten us to break our legs and break our body. So they would search all over, even to our uterus because they think that we are hiding money in our uterus. So somebody like me who's homeless, who's like a beggar who had to escape to China, how would we be able to hide money? So we were so humiliated and we were so shamed. And when we go to state security, you walk there but you come out as a debt course. And some pregnant women, when they go to this state security department, I think somebody mentioned they do forced abortion to this pregnant woman. I think when I was in New York, there was a human rights meeting. I forgot the name of the conference that took place in New York during the UN assembly. I brought this testimony of my fellow defector because she asked me to share this story. And I was in the same ward with her. So she was nine months pregnant and she had to go through forced abortion. But you know, miraculously the baby was aborted but did not die. But she was crying, the baby was crying and she cried but until the baby stopped crying in a cold room, I think she cried for about 20 to 30 minutes. After the baby died, they threw away in the bathroom. So when the mother went to the bathroom, she could see the baby that she gave birth in the toilet. So because she took the baby and tried to cover the baby with ash. But this angered the security officials. They said that this was the seed of a Chinese man and we had to show the others. So just because she, the mother tried to cover the dead baby with an ash, they beat her. She, the defector, now lives in Incheon but she went through a mental breakdown and she's still suffering from the experience. And recently she was able to bring back, bring the baby's father from China and there she's living with the baby's father. So she's living a more or less normal life right now in South Korea. When I went to China, as I said, at the ninth time, I had a two-year-old daughter. She was sold 3,000 yuan in China. I still don't know what happened to my daughter who was sold to Chinese at 3,000. I don't even know how old she is. In my memory, she's still two-year-old. I still don't have a photo of my daughter. I still hope that one day I would meet my daughter. The defectors of North Korea, why do we keep on defecting? It's because we are hungry, because we're born in North Korea. And because only thing we did was pledge allegiance to North Korea and Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-un. And they're prosecuting and oppressing these people who did nothing wrong. You know, when you keep on stepping on people who are good people, they will change into a tiger. So now they're changing in their testimony because we want to protect somebody who's still living in North Korea. We may change a little bit of information. We're not lying, but we want to protect those who are still in North Korea. North Korea is a socialist country. The people are starving, and their stomach is sticking to their back because of starvation. That's the only country in the world who let their people suffer to this extent. Three million people died of starvation. 27,000 people defected from North Korea. These are the witnesses. These are the person who can provide testimonies. We have 27 people who can testify of what's going on in North Korea. Please listen to the voices of these 27,000 defectors. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ms. Lee, for your impassioned and powerful statement. Over to you, Joe. Thank you. Actually, before Joe gets started, let me just give him a commercial. There is an HRNK report that Joe has heard on Camp 15, and there are copies available out in the lobby. Thank you. Excuse me. It's always a challenge to follow up after a person who has escaped from North Korea after I told my personal stories. It is something visceral when you hear that they have gone through. About 35 years ago, I think, I was persuaded to study North Korea defense and intelligence affairs. I would say I was dragged into it, but after I got into it, it was actually fascinating. During that time, I met a large number of defectors, spoke with them at length. However, they were mostly about defense issues. While I knew about the camps and had a relatively good understanding of what happened, the priorities were not in that area. In fact, in two of my books, they only received passing mention. Once again, it was priorities, as was mentioned earlier by several people. It wasn't until about five years ago, maybe when Greg came to HRNK, that I dedicated time to helping Greg and HRNK produce reports using satellite imagery to understand what was happening in the camps. It's interesting when you look from space at something. You can see things that are happening, but you can't tell necessarily why they were happening. I can see a building being built. I can see a building being torn down. I can't tell you why normally. So that's important to understand about satellite imagery. People find it very seductive. I want to look at this. I want to see this. I can see something in a country I can't even see, which is very true. The challenge is seeing enough of the imagery and seeing it on a more frequent basis than the average person can tell. This gives you a basic understanding. It's important to remember, satellite imagery is a tool. It's just a tool. It's a tool that others can use, people like David when he writes his reports or Greg when he adds it to something he's doing. It's a tool to help them explain something that's happening. It's also a tool for those who have left North Korea so they can tell us where they were at any specific time. This in turn is important to understanding and building an evidentiary case against those who have possibly committed crimes. If someone says they were tortured in a certain building and you understand when they were tortured, you go back and look if the building was there. It's used to both confirm and negate information. It's also used to cue you about new developments that are happening. What I have here is a small selection of imagery and a few comments about satellite imagery which might be of use to most people. This is the report that was just referenced and to the right is an older report we did on CAM25 in Chongjin. And they're available on Greg's website. We always talk about resolution. Well, to myself as an analyst, I talk GSD, ground sensor distance. So when we take an image, the size of that pixel, each pixel, what does it represent on the ground? That's what you call resolution, that's what I call GSD. So the thing to remember though is when we talk high resolution we're talking less than a meter. So each pixel is less than a meter in diameter. And that only started to come about in commercial imagery in 1999. And then in 2002 we had an additional satellite. Until today we have a nice constellation. During the next five years the number of satellites in orbit over the earth is going to increase dramatically. Most of these satellites they mentioned here pass over between 1030 and noon because that's the best time of the day for sunlight. So anything that happens before that during the day or after that during the day, you won't see. Because there's so few, you can't tell pattern of light. What's happening? What's the life like in a particular area? And this is critical in understanding the prison system in North Korea. Best commercial satellite imagery is 30 centimeters. And that'll be starting to be released I think at the end of next month. So each pixel represents 30 centimeters. At that resolution I can start telling people. I can only see shadows of people at 50 centimeters but I actually start seeing people. I can start seeing detail that is unprecedented at the unclassified level. The thing to remember about resolution or ground sensor distances if you take a flashlight to point it straight down you have the perfect circle. That very really happens with satellite imagery. It's always off to the angle a little and equal that off-nater. So if you take that flashlight you move it to the right a little. You look at the circle on the ground which represents the pixel. It's now oblong. So the further off-nater you get the less resolution and I'm using that word loosely here. Processing. Everybody here looks at Google Earth. Everybody thinks they're an imagery analyst now. Google Earth is a phenomenal tool. Google has to face certain production constraints. They have to process thousands of images. They have to try to make them all look the same. They have to buy them. So it costs a lot of money to buy satellite imagery. So what you have is a generic processing applied and then you have a lack of currency. And I'll show you what that means in a second. And we'll just move on. The other thing is the way you look at imagery. Google is always north up. You can rotate it, but I as an analyst always rotate my image so I'm looking at an object the way the satellite was looking at it. So the image on the left is north up. The image on the right is the way the satellite was looking at it. The image on the right is arguably more intuitive for the brain to interpret and understand. Processing. This is a small section of Chem 15. The image on the left is from Google Earth. The image on the right is one that I processed myself and that was taken like three weeks, four weeks later. It's difficult to see. I can't see it from here. But if you look in the river bed, right above the dam, which is that horizontal line at the bottom of the image, you'll see rock piles in the river bed. You don't see that in the Google Earth image. And the image on the right, I just quickly processed the throat in a slide. It could even be sharper. This is important when you're trying to identify fence lines. You're trying to identify what is happening to a building. And this ties into what defectors tell us. Well, they say there was a fire here at a certain time. Well, we can actually now have the ability to confirm or deny that. How can satellite imagery help? As I said before, it can either negate, meaning disprove, or can verify, prove something that we are being told. You have access to areas that no one else has access to. The North Koreans have not allowed us in. We have an ability to look in. It's objective. It's an evidentiary. I can bring it in. I can show the judge that there was a building there on the state. I can say, judge, there is no building there, that thing. This is important. If someone claims they were not at a camp or nothing was happening or the mine wasn't working when he was guard at the camp, we can now verify or negate that statement to some degree. It's a slice in time. This is what happened today. This is what happened in two months now. This is happening a year ago. When you put it together by itself, it's a tiny slice of time, but when you put them together, you can tell a story. And that story is important in bringing people who have committed crimes against humanity to justice. It's repeatable and it's timely. Google Earth is not that timely. However, on my desk computer, there are at least 20 images of North Korean camps that were taken in the past. Okay, now it's two months. You just don't have that on Google Earth. And as I said, it supports a refute statements. This shows you the imagery that was taken over North Korea by one company in seven days. Each one of those red boxes represents a satellite image that was taken. And in this case, almost all those images are 0.5 centimeter GSD. In other words, each pixel represents 50 centimeters. This is what it looks like over 30 days. So you can see the areas of interest of the people that were purchasing imagery. This is only the publicly available archive of imagery for one of the companies. But you can see how some of the camps have been very nicely covered. This is Camp 15. Camp 15 is quite large, although it's not the largest camp in North Korea. You could fit two Washington DCs inside that box. Well, it's not a box, but inside that polygon. That's how large it is. This shows a little time sequence of Sosung-mi East. It's an area that really east of the little village of Sosung-mi. In Camp 15, it shows a mining activity. The big white, it's hard if I had a pointer, I could point it out. The white dot in the center top is the mine head. The white splotch below it to the left is a retention pot. This was taken in 2011. And you also see some blue-roofed buildings. Those are the processing buildings. War comes up, it's processed in those buildings, and the remains go into the retention pot. So all of a sudden, 2013, that pond is almost doubled in size. That's an active mindset. People are in there, they are mining, they are processing it. Can I tell you if those are prisoners? I can make that supposition because I see the whole campus as a whole. But I can't tell you how they're being treated. That's where you and people like David will interview the defectors and will then provide information and together we can build a complete picture. So this is 2013. I think it's visible to you, but there's a line going bisecting that retention pot. That's how they get the slurry out there and they dump it. This was taken in December. That pipeline is no longer there in the retention pot. You see a scarring on it, but you don't see the pipeline itself. The blue-roof processing buildings are no longer there. This is no longer an active mining site. This can help confirm or refute a story by a defector. Here's Camp 25. It's a little red dot about Chongqing. It is different than all the other colonies, so it looks more like a traditional provincial prison. This is what it looked like in 2003. There are 20 guard posts and you can see the light blue outline representing fences and walls. 2006, two more guard posts. The perimeter has expanded. 2010, 38 guard posts from this extended even more. Here we can start telling the story. We ask questions now, why did this happen? And this can be filled in by reports and other information we got. This is a high-off nadir, in other words, it's taken at a real angle. And this is panchromatic, in other words, black and white. We actually shoot panchromatic far more than we do natural color imagery, because the green is finer and we can get a better resolution. This one is high-off nadir. You can see the towers. You can see the shadow of the tower even more. And you can see the barbed wire shadow on top of the fence. This is the Chomabong restricted area. This is identified when looking at one of the other camps. And all of a sudden we saw this activity around Chomabong, Chomabong Mountain. And it has all the characteristics of a Kwan-Li so. This image, it's hard to tell, is rotated so north is to your right. And we're looking at this little valley. It's not very big. And all of a sudden, several years later, there were all these guard posts. 20 guard posts. Covering, enclosing 14 square kilometers. I can't because of the light, I can't even see. Okay, this is the area where the main gate is going to be built. This is what it looked like before. All of a sudden, there's an improved road. You can see the fence is being put in, actually put in. Okay, you can see a guard shack. Now you have a traditional guard facility with entrance, controlled access, and a fence. You saw the rounded roof guard post in Camp 25. It was an almost identical one on the hill above the Chomabong area. Housing. One of the things we're always asked, how many people are in there? It's almost impossible to tell unless you have some more information. These are housing units that are, to use the term, we say two-family units. We understand that families typically put in these units, but we say two-family. It's divided in half. But if we use the analogy of North Korean armies, they use bunk beds. So if you can fit physically 10 people normally in this, well, if they all had bunk beds, you now have 20 people. If they use three-tier bunks, and you can see the challenge that you face when you try to predict populations strictly by footprints of buildings. The other thing is some buildings are used for administrative. Some are used for storage. So even though they might have the same footprint, it's difficult to tell. So this is what it looked like during construction. This is what it looks like after construction. Notice the building in the center with the dirt all around it, the compacted dirt. That would most likely be an administrative type building, as opposed to housing for the others. And that's it. Any questions? You're free to ask me later or even during the panel. Thanks very much, Joe. And Joe, if I may, let me begin with asking you a question. Do you have any indication that North Korea is manipulating images for their benefit? Yes, we do. It's not that they're manipulating the image. They're manipulating what we see. They will, and we've seen occasionally because of whole series of circumstances, they were expecting our satellites to come over at a certain point in time, because they always do. And they would stop work on something. However, using high-off-nater imagery, so in other words, a satellite wasn't directly over North Korea at the time, but it was far off over Japan. In one case, it was 1200 kilometers away, and it took an image. And we saw a great deal of activity when they weren't expecting us to be looking. We also practice what we call CCD, camouflage, concealment, and deception. It's a practice that is used throughout the military and security services, where they attempt to camouflage something they're doing, or conceal it, or deceive us into believing that the activity we're looking at is something else. It's embedded in their doctrine, and it has been since the time of the Korean War. Thank you. To return to the issue of defector testimony, let me begin with you, Blaine, if I may. And could you comment on Shin Dong-yuk's recent recantation of details that he previously told you? Will this have an impact on the larger issue of defector testimony overall? It has. It has had an impact. And part of it is his notoriety. He became arguably the most famous defector from North Korea, in part because of my book, but also in part because he testified all over the world and spoke to the equivalent of 60 minutes in every developed country in the world. And his story was out there. And he told it consistently, and he told it well. And he told it for a long time. I just went back when I found out in January 16th, a month and a day ago, that his story was that he decided to change his story. I called him and asked him what the new details were, and then put those in the newspaper in the Washington Post as quickly as I could. And then I went out to try to find out how his story had changed. And what's interesting, I think the most interesting thing to realize about Shin is that he told almost exactly the same story, changing almost no detail for nearly nine years. He told me in our conversations that he decided when he was still in China, he heard that when he arrived in South Korea that he would be interrogated by South Korean intelligence. He said that this brightened him. And he decided that there were some things that he was going to conceal and change. And he did. He said that he wrote a streamlined script in his own mind. And when he arrived in South Korea in 2006 and had long rounds of interviews with the South Korean intelligence people and then with U.S. Army intelligence, he stuck to that script. And then when he was finished with that, within about a year, he wrote the script down. He went to an NGO in South Korea, NKDB, North Korea Database, a very good group. And he wrote down his version of what happened. And once he wrote it down, he had it there for him. And then he stuck to that script almost without a single change. The one change, the one significant change in his script that I'm aware of occurred in interviews with me. We did 20, 30 interviews over two years in South Korea and in the United States. And in one of our last interviews, he changed the script. This was in the summer of 2010. He told me that he was responsible in large measure for the death of his mother and brother because he betrayed them to a guard. And when he told me that, which was new, which he'd never said, I said, I panicked and said, well, what else do you want to change? And he said, that's it. That's the one thing that I could not say. And in a sense, that made me feel that he was telling me the truth then. I asked him about that just two weeks ago. And he said at that point in a hotel room in Southern California in August 2010, he was on the brink of spilling the whole story. But he couldn't do it. And he was motivated by the video site of his father that the North Korean government released to realize that he couldn't keep his story hidden anymore. And so he has since come out. And to summarize what he said that's different, he said that he was born in Camp 14. And there is some significant evidence that he was indeed born in the camp, that the borders of the camp shifted after his birth, but that he spent most of his youth and teenage years in Camp 18. A camp that over the years became increasingly less restrictive. He said that then he escaped from that camp twice. On the second time, he made it all the way to China. Was in China for four months before he was caught and repatriated, as so many other defectors have been. And then he was brought back to Camp 18. And then he was taken to Camp 14 for punishment for having been a two-time escapee. And that's when he was tortured. The evidence of torture on his body is obviously there. The evidence of trauma that he has experienced is there from people who've interviewed him at multiple stages since he's come to South Korea. I talked to the U.S. Army interrogator who spoke to him just a few weeks after he landed at Inchon, coming from China. And he said that he was uniquely traumatized at that point. Now, what I have learned in recent weeks, and I learned before, I've always was skeptical of Shin's story and wrote that into the book. But I think that one of the larger issues that his change story should tell all of us interested in North Korean human rights is that there's a tension between the power of testimony and the capacity of traumatized people to tell a linear truth of the sort that journalists and judges like. The more traumatized a person is, and this has been well established by psychologists who've treated traumatized people from all over the world, the more traumatized a person is, particularly if they suffer from repeated and extended bouts of torture, is that their relationship to the truth is different than a non-traumatized person. They tend to hide things that they're embarrassed or ashamed about, and they tend to bend their story so they can present an acceptable version of themselves to the world. And how they determine what an acceptable version is depends on what their experience was in North Korea, in the camps with torturers. And Shin was tortured as much, if not more, than any camp survivor, according to one of the people who used to work for the Boibu, the political police. And consequently, his relationship to the truth as journalists and judges like to hear it is going to be different. And as I said at the beginning of this, what makes Shin such a persuasive witness, but also such a difficult witness to see that he may not be telling the truth, was that he told a consistent story for almost a decade. Thank you. David, I wanted to ask you about defector testimony, refugee testimony. You've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of North Koreans over your career. The thing that seemed to have, one of the triggers for Shin to change his testimony was seeing a video of his father, which North Korea made public. Every North Korean I've ever interviewed is terrified that their family is going to suffer because of their speaking to a journalist or to somebody else. How does that resonate with what your experience is and what we're going to learn about defectors from defectors going forward? Okay, that's one of two concerns I have about researching and documenting human rights violations going forward. And as you intimated, I think that as part of their response to the COI, the North Korean authorities have decided to undertake relentless campaign against the refugees who provide testimony to the international community. And I fear that that's likely to continue. Most of the biographies that are available in English now, the three major ones, are about men. I'm aware of three biographies about North Korean women that are forthcoming. And that's very important testimony because of the gender dimensions of the human rights situation in North Korea. Two of those refugees are very young women. And I worry that the intelligence services and the security services of the regime will pull their parents, relatives, neighbors, and put them on North Korean TV denouncing the family member who's now in South Korea providing the testimony and take their campaign against these refugees to the General Assembly, to the UN in an attempt to discredit the testimony of the refugees. So I hope that those of us who are NGOs or government officials can find some way to back up and provide some way to stand in solidarity and support with the refugees who provide testimony who I fear will be coming under very harsh criticism backed by the North Korean government at the hands of the North Korean government. That's one concern that I have going forward. Another concern I have is the growing paucity of new information. We're expected to be able to provide a kind of timeline on violations, whether it's getting better, whether it's getting worse. And for that we need new sources of information. When I first started doing research for the committee, 2002, 2003, there were some 3,000 North Korean refugees or defectors in South Korea. In the subsequent decade, the refugees were coming from North Korea by the thousands every year so that you end up now with 27,000. I suppose it's conceivable that all the North Koreans who want to go to China or South Korea have already gone. But we know for a fact that the North Koreans have tightened up the border a great deal. And in response to a couple of shooting incidents by defecting army soldiers, the Chinese have tightened up. So it is now much more difficult for North Koreans to get from North Korea into China and make their way to South Korea where they can provide us new sources of information. And I believe that also applies to increasing difficulty in getting information out of North Korea from the kind of news services that Ki-Hong and others organize in Seoul. I think it's tougher to get phone messages out of North Korea than it was several years ago. This is something I wanted to ask Mr. Han about. You have developed over the years a kind of new source of information from North Korea. That is North Koreans who are willing to report to you and to others about what's happening there. Has that source of information, is it expanding or is it decreasing? What's happening there? Before I answer that question, I'd like to comment on the remark made by Bain Hart. Actually, I thought about it a lot during the past week. If I was not involved in the North Korean human rights issue for 17 years, I don't think I would be in a position to be criticized for providing testimony. My old friend David Hawk published the Hidden Gulag and in 2007 published The Collective Adversity. They are crying and then Prison Camp 18, Kim Hye-soon and Bain Hart escaped from Camp 14. The original before that is coming out into the world. I read all of those books. Mr. Shin's recant of his testimony is maybe based on the trauma that he suffered or whether his base for providing testimony is the source. I think we really need to have a serious thought about that. I think the changed story is after he was six years old. He transferred from Camp 14 to Camp 18. Somebody said, is that a more severe camp or less severe camp? Of course, that is true because that is a very important part of the human rights issue. However, when you read the book and the book written by Mr. Bain Hart, of course, there can be a lot of inaccuracies, but these are not inaccuracies of the fact. He himself did not even hear the name Kim Jong-il or Kim Il-sung in the camp, but based on the testimony by Kim Hye-sook, 12-year-old Kim Hye-sook was present in Camp 18. But she saw the photos of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. If that's the case, if he was transferred to Camp 18 because he went to the elementary school from seven-year-old, he must have seen the photos going to make it short. So whether he is saying something that he experienced himself or he is reiterating something that he heard from other people, we need to actually separate the two. Just because you are victimized, we shouldn't just let it go. Yesterday Mr. Shin Dong-chul said he is going to resume his activist position for North Korean human rights, and I think Mr. Shin should resume his activities because he came to the free world and he experienced the value and the preciousness of freedom so that he wants to play a part in helping the North Korean people to experience what he experienced and also he knows how superior democracy and freedom is. But there should be a precondition to that. When we stand in front of the truth, we feel uncomfortable because truth, you have to be brave to tell the truth. So if Mr. Shin can be brave and be brave with the truth with himself and also be able to differentiate, if something is that something he experienced himself or he heard from other people, I think that should be a precondition to his activities. And to go back to the question, we wanted to establish an alternative force, about 20 activists in China participated and we also have a lot of sources in North Korea who provide information to us. So we have a network in China and North Korea. But as David said, David Hock said, China has an intelligence agency and many of our sources were detained by the Chinese intelligence, so that weakened our network. And also in North Korea, we were able to provide for a long time source, first-hand source from North Korea, but we are actually seeing a weakening of these North Korean sources. After Kim Jong-un took power, the border between China and North Korea was strengthened, so we do not have any new sources in North Korea. So, you know, as you said, the importance of the first-person source actually have weakened based on our experience. However, we are utilizing the technology and science, so we are looking at various satellite photos and pictures which will supplement the testimonies. But this is not new. In 1996, when Kang Cheol-han came, when he was interviewed by the Korea NSA, they were able to see that Yeodok prison camp. So I think now CIA from the United States or the intelligence agency of South Korea maybe need to be provided to the civil groups that deals with North Korea and human rights issue. If there's no collaboration between the two, it would be very difficult to come up with new sources. We also heard from the testimonies from the two defectors, and these are, I believe, their 100 percent truth. Our attention to North Korean human rights is stronger than ever before. I think we should use these opportunity. And those involved, we really have to look upon ourselves to whether what we're telling is truth and more accurate. It's not because we're being criticized by North Korea. It's also because we want to be ethical and we want to recognize the importance of our testimony. Thank you. We have time for a couple of questions. Yes, Henry, in the back, please. Thank you. Wonderful panel, wonderful event today. I just want to, before I ask my question, I think... Henry Sung, could you identify yourself, please? I'm sorry. Just a local activist from the Virginia area. Before I ask my question, I want to preface that with something that I want to say as a friend of Shin Dong-young, and I don't think this should be a place for criticizing or attacking Mr. Shin. He's not here to defend himself. And as a friend, I must point out that regardless of the fact that he was not forthcoming and truthful in his testimony or his past, I think we need to understand, as some of the panelists have shared, that he has gone through suffering that is beyond anyone's imagination or thinking. So in that sense, we should just give him some time to breathe for him to, in a way, collect himself. And as he starts his new chapter in his life regarding, you know, since all this happened, my question perhaps should be, would be more, I don't know, appropriate for the next panel session, but in terms of the recent attacks by the regime against the defectors, Mr. Shin and also Hyun-mi Park and other attacks that the regime inflicts on defectors, high-profile defectors, I think in the case of Dong-young, in the case of Mr. Shin, for example, instead of the international community taking a step back or faltering if you will, I think we should go on the offensive. We should say right back to the North Korean regime or to the people via information sent into North Korea, whether it's by balloons or USBs or whatnot through the border area. We need to go on the offensive and tell the North Korean people and the regime that this is the system, this is the regime that has produced victims like Dong-young and countless other defectors like Mr. Chung and Mrs. Lee who are speaking here today. Is this your question? Do you want the panel to respond? Yes, that's my question. So in light of today's event commemorating one year anniversary of the release of the report, it's a very meaningful event. So instead of attacking a defector or other defectors or throwing him under the bus or whatnot, I think we should be more proactive in terms of... Thank you. Would anybody like to comment on this? Sure. Yes. If I was not engaged in North Korean human rights for the 17 years, actually I have worked as a publisher of a publishing company in Korea. So I had easy access to information about North Korea's human rights. So I'm very familiar with this issue. And I also was engaged in broadcasting programs to North Korea for a long time. I'm still collecting information or sending information to North Korea through China. And I'm also collecting a lot of information to provide it to South Korea. So I'm not here to attack Shin Dong-hyuk. Of course, Shin Dong-hyuk is one of the victims, so he needs to be given a time to breathe. However, if you are his true friend, if he makes a mistake, then your friend should be able to tell him. I'm not definitely saying that he lied to you. But I'm not quite sure whether this is based on his own experiences or this is something that he heard from others. We need to distinguish between these two. Otherwise, we cannot see him as a true activist of a human rights. I think this must be a precondition for him to resume his activities. And this is my hope for him. I'm not saying that he lied. However, when it comes to social activities, you cannot build a castle on top of the sand. The farm ground and the fundamental foundation can be laid out only when you speak about the truth. And I would like to talk about the power of the truth. Questions? Yes, Carl. Blaine, thank you so much for what you said in your account. By the way, I'm one of the people who continues to believe in Shin. I think he's a miracle and I think he inspires the whole movement that he could recover the way he did. But what I don't understand is what was it that he was in the difference between the two stories that made him want to tell the first story and that he felt he couldn't tell the way it happened in the revised account. You mentioned linear truth. Was it that the story was simpler? What would have been a problem in talking to South Korean intelligence to say that what he's saying now and that he went to China and was caught and sent back? Why was he concerned about telling the version of the story that he's now telling? I don't understand. And then just one other question, which is I take it that the way he escaped is still unrevised. Right. He says that he escaped from Camp 14 very much as described in the book. As to why he changed his story, he said that he was deeply ashamed of his role in betraying his mother and brother. It was more than just turning them into a guard saying that they were talking about escape. He said that he signed a document that he knew to be false that had been given to him by a guard in Camp 18. And the document said that they committed a murder. He knew that to be false and he signed it anyhow and he signed it because he had an awful relationship with his mother and he was very jealous of his older brother who he thought received more affection from his mother than he did. So it was a family dysfunction issue as much as anything to do with his abuse in the camps. So that was one thing that he was very ashamed of. And the second thing that he said that he was ashamed of was his response to torture when he was taken to Camp 14. He had discussed on many occasions how he was hung upside down by shackles and how he was burned over a fire. And there are scars on his body to reflect that. But he never was willing to talk about what he said was the most painful and humiliating part of his torture which was having his fingernails pulled out with pliers one by one. And he said that he did not respond in a way to that that he was proud of. I mean he was extremely ashamed by his buckling by being broken by that torture. So he never mentioned it. He never mentioned it to me until our phone conversation a month and a day ago. Whether that explains why he then told the Korean intelligence and American intelligence the story about having been a very sheltered young boy in Camp 14 and not knowing anything outside of the outside world and then why he repeated that in his book and repeated it so consistently with in really thousands of interviews over a decade. I don't understand why he made that story made those connections. And he doesn't explain it well. He does explain about the fingernails and about the betrayal of his mother. And I repeatedly ask him in eight nine ten hours of conversation. But that's as much as I could get out of him. I'm afraid we're out of time. Ms. Lee Mr. Jung thank you very much and thanks to all of the panelists.