Time for the 'Never Agains' on North Korea -- By Nicholas Eberstadt, The Wall Street Journal

A new U.N. report erases any doubts or excuses that might have been made for the murderous Pyongyang regime  

One of several drawings submitted by North Korean defector Kim Kwang-il to United Nations investigators depicting what he saw during his time as a prisoner. UN/OHCHR

In the past there were excuses for those inclined to ignore or deny the horrors the Democratic People's Republic of Korea routinely visits upon its subjects. Defectors have an ax to grind, we were told. American intelligence is making up stories, and Pyongyang's foreign enemies stand to profit from these tales. 

There is nowhere for North Korea's apologists to hide now. The 200,000-word, nearly 400-page report released Monday by the "commission of inquiry" for the United Nations Human Rights Council, led by the Australian jurist Michael Kirby, in effect presents the world with the black book on North Korean communism.

The report is a careful but shocking document, the result of a year-long investigation, based on public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington, public testimony from more than 80 witnesses and an additional 240 private interviews. Much of the material is based on firsthand testimony of escapees from this hell on Earth.

"The gravity, scale and nature of these violations . . . does not have any parallel in the contemporary world," the report says. It charges the North Korean government with "crimes against humanity" and urges international action. The question to those of us beyond the reach of the North Korean regime is: Now that we know this terrible truth, what do we do about it?

Just as the Soviets had the gulag system of political prison camps, so too does the rule-by-terror Communist government in Pyongyang maintain a North Korean version with dozens of camps.

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