A/HRC/25/CRP.1 economy spread as a result of the food crisis, it became possible to “buy” stateowned houses. His parents-in-law were able to buy a second floor apartment for him and his wife but the housing official needed to be bribed in order to have the transfer of residence registered.436 361. In the determination of one’s place of work and residence by the state, one’s songbun social classification plays a key role.437 As the Commission heard at the Seoul Public Hearing, people who are not politically reliable are forcefully moved to places that are difficult to live in, such as mining and farming areas.438 Children of those assigned to menial jobs in marginalized areas are usually assigned to the same work and place to live. 362. During the purges in the early decades of the DPRK’s history, large numbers of people, who were considered to be of low songbun but escaped the political prison camps, were forcibly relocated to more remote areas and reassigned to arduous labour in farming or mining. As a result, provinces such as North and South Hamgyong today have a much higher concentration of people of low songbun than other areas, especially Pyongyang where mainly only people of good songbun are allowed to live. According to one submission received by the Commission, following the reclassification of DPRK citizens into 51 sub-categories under the 3 classes of songbun, 70,000 people from 15,000 families who were classified as belonging to the hostile class were banished to remote mountainous areas. “Many of the areas they were banished to became prison camps.”439 363. The Commission heard from witnesses who spoke about being relocated from Pyongyang and other cities to more remote parts of the country and usually made to work in mines due to low songbun, resulting from their grandparents or parents having come from South Korea, having moved to the South during the Korean War, or having been landlords or Christians. Families could also be relocated due to a family member having been charged as a political dissident and sentenced to a political prison camp (kwanliso).440 • Mr Ji Seong-ho, who provided testimony at the Seoul Public Hearing, spoke about having been raised in a town near a coal mine which was surrounded by mountains, and how the majority of the residents had been exiled from other regions. He described how the population was particularly affected by mass starvation in the late 1990s, since they were entrapped without food deliveries in the marginalized area: “I was born in a mining area. A lot of people starved to death at the time. For livelihood, there wasn’t much we could do to stay alive. We were surrounded by mountains. So we had to dig roots and [eat] the skins of trees and grass.”441 • The daughter of a male abductee from South Korea, spoke of how her family was first exiled to a location in the mountains in the late 1970s. They were made to relocate again to an even more remote location about a year or two later following her father’s death from suicide.442 364. The Commission also received accounts of party officials and their families who, without being duly convicted by a court of law, were assigned to hard labour in a remote area for failings in their duty or for lesser political wrongs committed by the official or a 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 TSH052. See section IV.B for more on Songbun system. National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK), Seoul Public Hearing, 22 August 2013, afternoon. Submission to the Commission: SUB055, Kim Hi-tae and Peter Jung, The Persecuted Catacomb Christians of North Korea (Seoul, Justice for North Korea, 2013), p. 41. TSH020, TSH030. See section IV.E on political prison camps. Seoul Public Hearing, 22 August 2013, morning (01:18:30). TSH032. 101