A/HRC/25/CRP.1 he had no option but to cross the border as the government was not feeding him and his family.484 • One witness had decided to cross the border in 1998 because he was starving and planned to seek help from his relatives there. He had every intention of coming back as he had wanted to complete his studies at the university. The situation became dire with the death of Kim Il-sung. In his university, the situation was so poor that students stole from each other. He travelled in secret towards the border area and knew he was lucky not to have been caught. He heard that if he was caught, he could be sent to a detention facility where those kept there are “not treated as humans”. Such a description of the treatment in the detention facilities for repatriated persons is consistent with other testimony received by the Commission.485 386. Although hundreds of thousands of people were starving to death in the 1990s in the DPRK, the authorities never lifted the travel ban or allowed citizens from the border regions to go to China, where many had ethnic Korean relatives or could have found work to survive. Only in 1999 or 2000, as the situation was already improving, Kim Jong-il apparently issued instructions that those who showed that they only went to China for food and work should be treated with a degree of leniency.486 However, even during the relative short period of “leniency”, the practice of consistently punishing anyone forcibly repatriated from China was never fully abandoned. 387. Moreover, later in 2000, after the mass starvation ebbed off to some degree, orders were again given to “mercilessly suppress” all “defection” and the state forcefully reasserted its control over the border.487 388. Nevertheless, the patterns of illegal border crossing that emerged during the famine continued in the 2000s, despite on-going efforts to repress escapees from the DPRK and deter any unauthorized crossing using severe violence and harsh punishment. Since Kim Jong-un emerged as the heir apparent in 2009 and assumed many functions from the ailing Kim Jong-il, there has been a push to seal the border.488 This has lessened outflows into China, evidenced also by fewer DPRK nationals reaching the ROK. • Mr Kim Young-hwan, who works in a humanitarian network that has operations in the China-DPRK border region, informed the Commission that the number of people fleeing the DPRK peaked in 2009 with a progressive decrease thereafter. He noted an increased crackdown since Kim Jong-un came to power.489 484 485 486 487 488 489 Seoul Public Hearing, 24 August 2013, morning. TAP005. See also section IV.D. TJH004, TJH041. TJH004. EJH003 indicated that, apart from being driven by larger political reasons, Kim Jong-un may have also attached particular attention to border control since he was assigned to serve as a border guard as a young man. Seoul Public Hearing, 24 August 2013, afternoon. 109