More than a year after Ukrainian forces captured two North Korean soldiers in Russia’s Kursk region, the men’s future remains undecided. Under the Third Geneva Convention applicable to the armed conflict in Ukraine, prisoners of war (POWs) may be held until the end of active hostilities, but they can be repatriated or transferred to a third country before then.
These men, among the thousands of North Korean soldiers sent to fight alongside Russian forces, have said they want to go to South Korea, not returned home. Seoul has said it will accept them, and a senior European Union official recently affirmed the EU stands ready to assist.
North Korea’s military instructs soldiers to die rather than be captured, and state media glorifies such suicides as heroic. “I feel very uncomfortable just being alive,” said one of the soldiers. “Being a prisoner of war means betraying the country.” Returning POWs to North Korea would expose them to grave abuses, including enforced disappearance, torture, forced labor, and execution.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, in its 2020 Commentary on the Third Geneva Convention, states that the repatriation of POWs “must be understood as subject to an exception where the prisoners face a real risk of a violation of fundamental rights by their own country.” This is consistent with the principle of nonrefoulement under international human rights law, which prohibits the transfer of a person to a place where they would likely face persecution or torture.
In early February, the United Nations special rapporteur on North Korea, Elizabeth Salmón, stated that, “[t]he Ukrainian government is very well aware of the situation in North Korea, and they replied that there may be reasonable grounds to believe that they [the two POWs] could be subject to torture” if returned there. While Ukraine has no obligation to transfer the two men while hostilities are ongoing, prolonged uncertainty about the men’s future increases concerns that they could be returned to North Korea as part of a peace settlement.
Ukraine should work with South Korea and the EU to ensure that captured North Korean soldiers are protected from forced return to a government that is likely to treat them harshly.
