According to a report by South Korean news agency Yonhap, the group is known as the North Korean Writers in Exile PEN Center. It has been part of PEN International, an association of writers promoting literature and freedom of expression, since 2012.
The centre is led by North Korean defector Lee Gie Myung, who wrote plays in the republic for 20 years before escaping to South Korea in 2004.
He began writing for the group in 2008, working with other “defector-writers” to tell the world about the difficulties faced by North Koreans under the three-generation rule of the Kim family.
“I think I have a sense of mission to pen stories about North Korea,” Gie Myung was quoted as saying.
Human rights in North Korea have long been questioned, especially after a landmark report by the UN Commission of Inquiry released in 2014. The communist state does not tolerate dissent, keeps close control over outside information, and reportedly holds hundreds of thousands of people in political prison camps, according to Yonhap.
Following calls for the UN Security Council to refer North Korea’s “crimes against humanity” to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the defector-writers tried to assist by compiling testimonies of 20 individuals who had defected over Pyongyang’s abuse of rights. They also backed the request for ICC to look into the crimes of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
One testimony told the story of a man who was publicly executed in front of his family on charges of cutting and stealing a telephone wire to trade it for food, Yonhap reported. His wife later defected to South Korea where she told the group about her experience.
Another woman said she had tried to escape from North Korea but was caught and sent to a labour camp where she was beaten and sexually assaulted.
“North Korea is the most horrible human rights violator. And its extensive crimes against humanity are still not fully revealed,” the group’s secretary-general, Kim Jeong Ae, was quoted as saying.
Jeong Ae herself defected to Seoul in 2005 and has been writing since 2014.
“It is meaningful that defector-writers have begun to gain recognition,” Gie Myung told Yonhap.
“They are the ones who can speak up against North Korea’s abject human rights situation in their own voices.
“North Koreans will awaken and rise up if they get access to outside information,” he was quoted as saying.
“That’s what Kim Jong Un would fear the most.”