UN report: North Koreans forced to pay bribes to survive

North Koreans are forced to pay bribes to officials to survive in their isolated country where corruption is “endemic” and repression rife, the U.N. human rights office said on Tuesday in a report that Pyongyang dismissed as politically motivated.

The nuclear-armed state’s failure to provide basic necessities meant that North Koreans were forced to turn to “legally precarious” informal markets, exposing them to arbitrary arrest, detention, and extortion.

The UN study is based on the accounts of more than 200 North Koreans who have fled to South Korea over the past two years.

It said that the regime’s state-led system of centralized economic planning and distribution has “broken down” since North Korea’s economic collapse amid a deadly famine in the late 1990s.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the formal name for North Korea, rejected the report, saying it was “politically motivated for sinister purposes”.

“Such reports are nothing more than fabrication ... as they are always based on the so-called testimonies of ‘defectors’ who provide fabricated information to earn their living or are compelled to do so under duress or enticement,” its Geneva mission said in a statement.

North Korea blames the dire humanitarian situation on U.N. sanctions imposed for its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes since 2006. But the report said that the military receives priority funding amid “economic mismanagement”.

“I am concerned that the constant focus on the nuclear issue continues to divert attention from the terrible state of human rights for many millions of North Koreans,” Michelle Bachelet, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement.

“The rights to food, health, shelter, work, freedom of movement and liberty are universal and inalienable, but in North Korea they depend primarily on the ability of individuals to bribe State officials,” she said.

Four in 10 North Koreans, or 10.1 million people, are chronically short of food and further cuts to already minimal rations are expected after the worst harvest in a decade, a U.N. assessment said earlier this month.

“The threat of arrest, detention and prosecution provide State officials with a powerful means of extorting money from a population struggling to survive,” the U.N. rights office report said.