A/HRC/25/CRP.1 • A witness at the Seoul Public Hearing, Ms Kwon Young-hee, described the discrimination that her family confronted because both her parents were originally from South Korea. The family encountered discrimination when they sought to leave Musan in North Hamgyong Province and move to Pyongyang: “I learned about the fact that we were not able to relocate to Pyongyang. By the time we learned about the rejection we were old enough to understand that we were discriminated against, because my elder sister against her wish had to apply to this other college and so my siblings suffered from this kind of discrimination.”291 273. The Songbun system saw antecedents in the early policies of the DPRK when the leadership sought to elevate peasants and laborers over the former landlords and those they deemed to have been Japanese collaborators. In 1946, the North Korean Provisional People’s Committee began to purge officials who had been associated with the Japanese colonial administration and undertook the first citizen registration campaign. The official start of the Songbun system appears to have been in 1957 when the Party adopted the resolution “On the Transformation of the Struggle with Counterrevolutionary Elements into an All-people All-Party movement” (the May 30th Resolution). The adoption of this resolution was linked to a purge of potential rivals by Kim Il-sung. At that time, the division of people coalesced into three broad categories of core, wavering and hostile. 274. In conjunction with the May 30th Resolution, the Cabinet issued Decree No. 149 that dictated where members of the hostile class could reside and essentially exiled a large number of people to more remote parts of the country with more difficult living conditions. Other stages in the institutionalization of the Songbun system include the 1964 resolution “On Further Strengthening the Work with Various Groups and Strata of the Population”, which launched another campaign to refine the Songbun system. In 1966, a resident reregistration drive which lasted until 1970 led to the re-classification of the population into the three classes with 51 sub-categories.292 Other campaigns to re-examine political loyalty 291 292 76 Seoul Public Hearing, 24 August 2013, morning (02:57:55). The 51 categories are Core class: People from the families of laborers, hired people from the families of laborers, hired peasants (farm servants), poor farmers, and administrative clerical workers during the Yi Dynasty and Japanese occupation, Korean Workers’ Party bereaved families of revolutionaries (killed cadre members, in anti-Japan struggles), bereaved families of patriots (killed as noncombatants during the Korean War), revolutionary intellectuals (trained by North Korea after liberation from Japan), families of those killed during the Korean Wars, families of the fallen during the Korean War, servicemen’s families (families of active People’s Army officers and men), and families of honored wounded soldiers (family members of service members wounded during the Korean War); Basic class: Small merchants, artisans, small factory owners, small service traders, medium service traders, unaffiliated persons hailing from South Korea, families of those who went to the South (3 distinct categories), people who formerly were medium-scale farmers, nationalistic capitalists, people repatriated from China, intellectuals trained before national liberation, people from the core class who are deemed lazy and corrupt, tavern hostesses, practitioners of superstition, family members of Confucianists, people who were previously locally influential figures, and economic offenders; Complex (wavering and hostile) class: Wealthy farmers, merchants, industrialists, landowners or those whose private assets have been completely confiscated, pro-Japan and pro-US people, reactionary bureaucrats, defectors from the South, members of the Chondoist Chongu Party, Buddhists, Catholics, expelled party members, expelled public officials, those who helped South Korea during the Korean War, family members of anyone arrested or imprisoned, spies, anti-party and counter-revolutionary sectarians, families of people who were executed, anyone released from prison, and political prisoners, members of the Democratic Party, capitalists whose private assets have been completed confiscated. KINU, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea (2012), p. 222, citing source as Ministry of Unification report, “An Overview of North Korea”, 2000, p. 420.