Once again we are gathered to praise the outstanding work that Michael Cromartie and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom are doing. They continue to perform exactly as the Congress intended when it passed the International Religious Freedom Act, which created the Commission. They have kept the eyes of the world, and of our own policy makers, on the central importance of religious freedom in our foreign policy. I am proud to have been an original co-sponsor. 

    The Commission’s Report on its August visit to China, Policy Focus on China, which it released last week, was an outstanding contribution to our efforts to bring religious freedom to China. Its policy recommendations will help guide our efforts to bring freedom to that egregious violator of religious freedom and human rights. Its new report, Thank You, Father Kim Il Sung, is a major contribution to our understanding of the true religious situation in North Korea.

    North Korea's human rights abuses are a nightmare of epic proportions. The Government of North Korea is a totalitarian, Stalinist regime. Its dictator, Kim Jong-Il, brainwashes citizens into following a cult of personality and demands godlike reverence. He enjoys a decadent, opulent lifestyle while hundreds of thousands of children and their parents starve to death. Inside North Korea, there is no genuine freedom of speech, religion, or assembly.

    Yet North Korea has so restricted first hand-knowledge of what goes on in its Gulag society that it has managed to convince many people that the situation cannot be as bad as critics portray it. In a sense they are right: it is worse than anyone could make up. This new report, based on careful interviews with former North Koreans, makes it clear that there is no religious freedom in North Korea. Religious people, their families and descendants, are legally relegated to a subordinate position in society, where they are last in line for education, health care, housing, and food, in a society where even the favored classes have trouble finding enough to eat. A tiny number of selected individuals are allowed to practice some of their ancestral religions, under the tight control of the state, but all are compelled to worship – there is no other accurate way to describe it – Kim Il Sung. Those who are from non-Christian backgrounds who convert to Christianity, those who are caught with Bibles or Christian literature, are subject to horrific punishments, including public executions. President Bush was clearly correct in labeling North Korea as a nation as part of the ``axis of evil.'' 

    The report makes many excellent recommendations, but I would like to focus on those regarding the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, which Congress overwhelmingly passed. As a recent hearing held jointly by the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, under my chairmanship, and the Subcommittee on Asia and The Pacific, chaired by Jim Leach, who authored the Act (I was an original co-sponsor), it became patently obvious that the US is acting far too lethargically in implementing the provisions of the law. I strongly endorse the Commission’s recommendations to:

• Ensure that the Special Envoy, Jay Lefkowitz, have full authority to fulfill his mandate according to the Korea Human Rights Act;
  
• Work with countries in the region to provide safe haven, secure transit and resettlement for North Korean
  Refugees;
  
• Resolve bureaucratic issues complicating the resettlement of North Korean refugees in the U.S.;
  
• Expand radio, television, Internet and print information, and other media available to the North Korean
  people; 
  
• Insist that the Chinese government fulfill its obligations as a party to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.

    By its refusal to treat North Korean refugees as refugees, China acts as the greatest facilitator of the crimes of this monstrous regime. China routinely classifies North Koreans seeking asylum in China as mere ``economic migrants'' and returns them to North Korea without granting them proper hearings and without regard to the persecution they will face upon their return. Yet as this report makes it clear, the testimony of refugees who have escaped makes nonsense of China’s contention that these refugees are “economic migrants." 

    As President Bush heads for South Korea for the APEC Summit, and then to China, for a summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao, it is imperative that he raise with his interlocutors not only North Korea’s dangerous nuclear ambitions, but also its refusal to abide by even minimal human rights standards: a regime that pays not the slightest attention to the needs, interest or rights of its own people, is unlikely to care much what the international community thinks.