TANZANIA – Eunju Kim, who escaped starvation in North Korea in 1999, was sent back from China and fled a second time, told the United Nations on Tuesday that the country’s leader must be held accountable for gross human rights violations.

Gyuri Kang, whose family faced persecution for her grandmother’s religious beliefs, fled the North during the COVID-19 pandemic. She told the General Assembly that three of her friends were executed — two for watching South Korean TV dramas.

At the high-level meeting of the 193-member world body, the two women, both now living in South Korea, described the plight of North Koreans who U.N. special investigator Elizabeth Salmón said have been living in “absolute isolation” since the pandemic began in early 2020.

Thousands of North Koreans have fled the country since the late 1990s, but the numbers have dwindled drastically in recent years.

Salmón said North Korea’s closure of its borders worsened an already dire human rights situation, with new laws enacted since 2020 and stricter punishments, including the death penalty and public executions.

In another rights issue, she said, the deployment of North Korean troops to support Russia in its war against Ukraine has raised concerns about “the poor human rights conditions of its soldiers while in service, and the government’s widespread exploitation of its own people.”

The North’s “extreme militarization” enables it to keep the population under surveillance and it exploits the work force through a state-controlled system that finances its expanding nuclear program and military ventures, Salmón said.

North Korea’s U.N. Ambassador Kim Song called the allegations that his country violates human rights “a burlesque of intrigue and fabrication” and insisted that tens of millions of North Koreans enjoy human rights under the country’s socialist system. He accused the West of being the bigger violator, through racial discrimination, human trafficking and sexual slavery.

But the two defectors and human rights defenders detailed numerous abuses.

Kim, who said her father died of starvation, told U.N. diplomats that after making it to China across the Tumen River the first time, she, her mother and sister were sold for the equivalent of less than $300 to a Chinese man. Three years later, they were arrested and sent back to the North. In 2002, they escaped again across the river.

Kang, who was banished to the countryside as a 5-year-old because of her grandmother’s religious beliefs, said she became the owner of a 10-meter (33-foot) wooden fishing boat and escaped on it in October 2023 with her mother and aunt.

She said she was lucky to have access to information about the outside world and to have been given a USB with South Korean TV dramas, which she said she found “so refreshing and more credible than North Korea state propaganda,” though she knew being caught could mean death.

“Three of my friends were executed, two of them in public for distributing South Korean dramas,” Kang said. “One of them was only 19 years old. … It was as if they were guilty of heinous crimes.”

She expressed hope that her speech would “awaken the North Korean people” and help them “to point in the direction of freedom.”

Kim accused North Korea of sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine without them knowing where they were going and using them as cannon fodder to make money.

“This is a new and unacceptable form of human trafficking,” she said.

Kim called for the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, to be investigated and held accountable by the International Criminal Court.

Addressing the world’s nations, she said: “Silence is complicity. Stand firm against the regime’s systematic atrocities.”

Sean Chung, head of Han Voice, who spoke on behalf of a global coalition of 28 civil society organizations, called on China and all other countries to end forced repatriations to North Korea.

He called on U.N. member nations to urge the Security Council to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court, and to impose and enforce sanctions on “every official and entity credibly found to be responsible for North Korea’s atrocity crimes.”