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The latest in the North Korea foreign detainee files is a story that came out last week of Canadian Pastor Hyeon Soo Lim. According to The Globe and Mail report, Lim has traveled to North Korea more than one hundred times since 1997 and his Toronto-based church has helped establish an orphanage and nursing home inside the country. He apparently traveled to North Korea in January of this year on a routine humanitarian trip and has been detained in the DPRK since February.
Videos of Lim appeared in North Korean media twice last week, one of an official press conference on July 30, and another at a Sunday worship service at Pongsu Church in Pyongyang on August 2. In the videos a calm and collected—but clearly scripted—Lim confessed to using humanitarianism and love for the North Korean people as a pretext for bringing down the regime, thus insulting the “highest dignity” of the system.
What’s unusual about this case compared to many of the other detainees we’ve covered is that most of the crimes Lim admitted to were not directly related to his activities inside North Korea. Rather, he appeared to be detained for the crimes of speaking out against the regime and aiding North Korean refugees while outside the DPRK. Among the crimes he confessed to were denouncing the DPRK regime and predicting its demise while in South Korea, the US, Japan, Canada, and Brazil; collaborating with US and South Korean officials; and using church funds to support North Korean refugees. Lim’s detention underscores the problem that those in the engagement camp face: collaborating with the DPRK government to try to improve the lives of North Koreans while also maintaining the integrity to “call a spade a spade”, even when outside the country.
We can only speculate on the timeline for Lim’s release but suspect that these recent confessions may be signaling that the North Koreans want to get this problem off their hands. It should be noted that Canada does not have full diplomatic relations with the DPRK and, like the US, relies on Sweden to protect its consular interests inside the country. North Korean authorities also tend to treat “hyphenated” Koreans (Korean-Canadians, Korean-Americans, etc.) harsher as they can often speak the language fluently and know the culture, and are therefore potentially more dangerous.
Previous Posts on the Detainees
- Detainees and Envoys (April 2013; on the possible North Korean motive of securing visits by high level envoys)
- Detained Americans: Not-So-Innocents Abroad (September 2013; brief outlines of the American detainees)
- Merrill Newman “Confesses” (November 2013)
- Why is Kenneth Bae Treated More Harshly than John Short? (March 2014)
- Miller Matthew Todd (April 2014; how Miller’s name was initially reported by KCNA)
- State Department Travel Advisory Update (June 2014)
- Slave to the Blog: Abductions and Detainees Edition (June 2014; Fowle detention)
- Detainee Update and Canadians in Dandong (early August 2014 stories on the three Americans and the sweep against Christians along the Chinese side of the border)
- The Release of Jeffrey Fowle (October 2014)
- Bae and Miller Released, The Excellent Adventures of Matthew Todd Miller and James Clapper and The Hostage Rorschach Test (November 2014)
- Arturo Pierre Mendez (December 2014)
- Mike Chinoy on Merrill Newman (December 2014)
- Kim Kuk-ki and Choe Chun-gil (important indictment of two South Koreans for cross-border activities and espionage – March 2015)
- Won-Moon Joo (June 2015)
