North Korea is coming under greater international pressure over human rights issues as the U.S. and European Union are stepping up calls on the oppressive regime to free political prisoners and stop punishing repatriated defectors.

The European Parliament subcommittee on North Korea’s human rights issues hosted a session in Brussels Wednesday with some 70 officials from EU, civic groups and other related organizations.

Kim Chang-beom, Seoul’s ambassador to Brussels and EU, appealed for international support at the meeting to press Pyongyang to release Oh Hye-won and Oh Kyu-won, the daughters of Oh Kil-nam who fled North Korea in 1986.

Last week, the panel adopted a resolution calling on China to stop deporting refugees back to North Korea.

“If the EU continues to bring up the human rights issue together with the United Nations and other agencies, North Korea will at least make token gestures toward improvement, which can be the starting point of substantial progress,” Kim Tae-jin, a rights activist who crossed the border to China in 1997, said at the event. 

Robert King, the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, also addressed the U.S. government’s stance and the international community’s efforts regarding North Korea’s human rights record at the meeting.

King is expected to visit Seoul and Tokyo next month and perhaps Beijing in July to discuss the dire situation in the communist state.

On Tuesday Seoul announced that a U.N. agency recently ruled that the North has “arbitrarily” confined Oh’s two 30-something daughters and 70-year-old wife Shin Sook-ja. The decision was made by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Geneva.

Shin supposedly died last month after spending more than 20 years in a political prison camp. In a letter to a U.N. body, the North claimed that she had contracted from hepatitis and her daughters disowned their father, which Seoul believes is untrue.

South Korean officials and activists blasted Pyongyang for the letter’s lack of sincerity and details such as the time and location of Shin’s death. They also urged the autocratic regime to return her remains and her two daughters to the South.

“The human rights issue for the North Korean people is no less important than nuclear tests or missile launches. It should rather be dealt with more urgently,” President Lee Myung-bak said last week.

Up to 200,000 people are locked in six prison camps across North Korea, Amnesty International, a London-based human rights watchdog, estimated in its annual report last week. The bulk of the prisoners were incarcerated not for dissent but for minor violations such as singing South Korean songs, according to South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission.

More than 23,500 North Korean defectors are living in South Korea. Many of them have reported a wide range of abuses in the reclusive country including torture and public executions.

In the State Department’s report on human rights in 199 countries released late last month, North Korea was rated as “extremely poor” and remained at the bottom of the agency’s list along with China, Iran, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus.

The North has rebuffed accusations of its rights abuses, which it calls as an attempt to topple its government.

“We condemn the despicable human rights report worked out by the U.S.,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said, billing the U.S. report as a mere concoction of claims by a handful of criminals who betrayed their homeland.

By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldcorp.com)