A/HRC/25/CRP.1 family member. One witness described how an elderly close relative had died during his stint of “revolutionizing” forced labour in a mine after giving unsolicited advice to Kim Jong-il.443 These practices are on-going, evidenced by an amnesty that Kim Jong-un reportedly decreed in April 2012 for more than 600 officials who were undergoing such punishment.444 365. State-assigned employment as described above has a particularly harsh impact on men. Although men and women are both assigned places of employment upon completing their studies or military service, women who typically marry in their twenties in the DPRK are able to leave their state-assigned employment within a short time of getting married and when they have children. Men, on the other hand, are not released from the workplace designated by the state until the age of 60.445 Men therefore could not drop out of their state-assigned place of work as easily as women. This included when many state-owned enterprises ceased to operate at full capacity, if at all,446 during the famine in the mid-1990s. As women and men were not being paid or receiving food rations, women and men were forced to become creative in seeking incomes and household supplies. Married women were able to participate in the emerging underground markets with greater ease, while men had to find ways of circumventing the rigidity of the state-assigned employment to be able to engage in commercial activity on the side. Such engagement in commercial activity by men is, however, limited to those with both money to be able to pay a substantial bribe and good connections to the appropriate person in the organization who can “ignore” the entrepreneur’s absence. 366. The Commission finds that the DPRK’s policy of assigning its citizens’ residence and employment and denying them the option to change them at their own free will violates the right to freedom to choose one’s residence under article 12 of the ICCPR and the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his or her living by work which he or she freely chooses or accepts under article 6 of the ICESCR, in particular to the extent where such assignment is based on songbun social class. (i) Banishment from Pyongyang 367. As noted earlier, special circumstances surround the status of Pyongyang. Only people with good songbun are allowed to live in Pyongyang. Its residents are specifically issued with resident cards distinct from the ones issued to non-Pyongyang residents.447 If a family member commits an act deemed a political wrong or a serious non-political crime, the entire family is usually banished to a remote province and reassigned to other work. The consequences of this practice, which seems to have no basis under DPRK law, are often drastic. Adult family members are often reassigned to the most arduous and dangerous types of work, such as mining, logging or farming. The family also lose their privileged access to food, medical care and other public services that Pyongyang citizens enjoy.448 They usually have no family support networks to make up for the ensuing shortfalls. 368. A former official, described to the Commission a crackdown in June 2009 on gambling, which was apparently rampant in the parks of Pyongyang. His superiors told him 443 444 445 446 447 448 102 TJH015. See Good Friends, “North Korea Today No. 456”, 23 March 2012. Available from http://www.goodfriendsusa.blogspot.ch/2012/05/north-korea-today-no-456-may-23-2012.html. KINU, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea (2013), p. 351. KINU, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea (2013), p. 353 states that the average rate of factory operation is only 20-30 per cent due to the deteriorating economy and dilapidated infrastructure. KINU, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea (2013), p. 235 footnote 187. See section IV.D.