South Korean presidential office denounces 2019 return to North of fishermen accused of killing shipmates

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s presidential workplace denounced on Wednesday the repatriation of two North Korean fishermen in 2019 as a possible “crime towards humanity” by the earlier authorities, pledging to disclose the reality.

The feedback got here after Seoul’s Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North, launched pictures of the 2 males, who have been suspected of killing 16 shipmates, being forcibly dragged throughout the border between the neighbors.

“In the event that they have been forcibly repatriated to the North even after they expressed their will to defect, it’s against the law towards humanity that violated each worldwide regulation and the structure,” Kang In-sun, spokeswoman for President Yoon Suk-yeol, informed reporters.

She vowed that Yoon’s administration would uncover the reality behind the choice, as South Korean prosecutors have reopened an investigation into the case.

On the time, the federal government of then president Moon Jae-in referred to as the fishermen “harmful criminals who would threaten South Koreans’ security” as they killed colleagues in a shipboard combat over an abusive captain earlier than crossing the ocean border.

Moon has not commented on the renewed allegations, and Reuters couldn’t instantly hint contact particulars.

However opposition lawmaker Yoon Kun-young, who served as Moon’s scenario room chief, defended the transfer as being authorized and within the nationwide curiosity.

“President Yoon, are you saying we must always have let the grotesque murderers get away with their crime and shield them with our personal folks’s tax cash?” he wrote on Fb.

He was considered one of eight lawmakers who issued an announcement accusing the Yoon authorities of reopening the case to undermine political foes.

Human rights activists have condemned the repatriation, and a U.N. investigator mentioned South Korea had most likely violated the boys’s rights, by sidestepping an obligation for its justice system to take care of them moderately than deporting the boys.

Whereas their destiny has not been confirmed, there was an expectation their rights can be violated after they have been turned over to North Korean authorities, Tomas Ojea Quintana, the U.N. investigator, mentioned in Seoul final month.

“The 2 males’s determined resistance to being compelled again that’s so obvious in these images reveals that they understood they have been preventing for his or her lives,” Phil Robertson of New York-based Human Rights Watch mentioned in an announcement.

“Moon Jae-in and his officers knew that too, and but nonetheless they despatched them again.”

Robertson accused Moon of being “so determined to please North Korean supreme chief Kim Jong Un” that he “shamefully disregarded primary rules of human rights and humanity.”