Campaigners appeal for help for children born to defectors who are not recognised as citizens by either Beijing or Pyongyang

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Up to 30,000 children born to North Korean mothers who have fled the regime are living in China without access to schooling, health care or citizenship, MPs have heard.

North Korean human rights advocate Sungju Lee, a defector from the DPRK, said many of these children were born to women who had been sold to Chinese men by traffickers.

“These children, with no basic human rights, live as if they are not existing,” he told the parliamentary group on North Korea.

He described the life of a seven-year-old boy in Jilin province. “The child was supposed to startare in fact trying to earn some profits for themselves by selling us to Chinese men where shortage of women persists in rural north-eastern China,” she said.

Park gave a birth to a son, Yong-joon, but when he was four she was caught by the Chinese police and deported back to North Korea, where she was sent to a prison camp.

Yong-joon was left with an abusive Chinese father until Park was able to escape and return six months later.

The Parks now live in London, but many children like Yong-joon remain separated from their mothers who have been repatriated to North Korea.

Famine

The country’s refugee crisis started in the 1990s when it experienced a severe famine, killing around three million people. Hundreds of thousands illegally crossed the border to China in