South Korea’s spy agency has chose to retain 13 North Korean defectors at the heart of a bitter dispute between the rivals, with Pyongyang accusing Seoul of abducting the group from their posts at a restaurant in China, an official said on Tuesday.
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South Korea says they defected of their own free will, while the North claims they were abducted.
The hearing will pit officials from South Korea’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, (NIS) against a group of human rights lawyers who contend the 12 women are being illegally detained.
The court said in a statement the session would resume after it reviews the lawyers’ request.
The intelligence agency has held the group since its April 7 arrival in the South at a facility it runs on the southern outskirts of the capital, Seoul, where more than 1,000 defectors from the North stay each year in the initial stages.
After check-in the students were ushered inside a hotel banquet room where they quizzed North Korean defectors about life in a country that South Koreans aren’t allowed to visit, or even call. Two endangered rhinos died shortly after arriving in Pyongyang, while subsequent plans to ship giraffes, zebras and baby elephants to North Korea were only cancelled after worldwide pressure was brought to bear.
Meanwhile, North Korea’s state media has been publishing pleas from family members for their loved ones to be returned – although Pyongyang is notorious for its punishment of three generations of a family connected to a betrayal, a remnant of Korea’s past Joseon Dynasty. They say they defected willingly as a group.
“We have said repeatedly that the defectors from the North have entered the South on their free will”, ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee told a briefing. They are then kept for up to six months at a guarded facility where they receive vocational training and learn how to adapt to South Korean life.
Sixteen-year-old Kang Dawon offers “defectors, dictatorship and spies”.
The neutral Han estuary is of particular interest for its crab stocks at this time of year, encouraging Chinese crews to risk arrest to enter the area before fleeing – often back to North Korean waters.
But group defections are rare, especially by staff who work in the North Korea-themed restaurants overseas and who are handpicked from families considered “loyal” to the regime.
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The North Korean football team also trained in Zimbabwe ahead of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, while Zimbabwe paid North Korea $5 million (4.4 million euros) in early 2014 for two bronze statues – the largest one standing more than nine meters tall – to mark Mugabe’s 90th birthday.
