The report's leadership as well as their sources had close ties to NATO/Western forces. This is important because North Korea is at war with South Korea and the United States, and the primary front is propaganda. You can't expect your enemy to be impartial.

The fact that this made it into the report is utterly jaw-dropping. You can really just say the craziest shit about the DPRK and no one blinks. The report is peppered with bizarre, orientalist claims such as this gem. Here the report is actually trying to twist expanded child care services as plot by the NK govt to control women and children and make them think Kim Il Sung is their father. I'm not joking.

Little to no mention is made of the rights afforded to NK citizens for housing, food education, healthcare but whenever there is an issue or deficiency, all blame is squarely laid on the state for these issues and no external factors are considered relevant. The report basically takes NK, strips it of all context (especially the fact that it is under constant threat of total annihilation by the USA) and then fantasized about what they should be doing, as if their priorities to defend themselves are irrelevant.

This report was led by three members, who in turn reported to the President of the HRC. The President of the HRC at the time was Remigiusz Henczel of Poland, a NATO member. Poland is about as closely integrated with US military as it gets. The leader of the commission was Michael Kirby of Australia. Australia is a member of Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance that includes the US, Canada, UK, and NZ. Sonja Biserko of Serbia is also a member of the commission. Sonja is especially curious, because she founded the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia in 1994. The human rights narrative was the leading pretext for NATO bombing Yugoslavia. The third member of the commission was Marzuki Darusman of Indonesia, another country with close military and intelligence ties to the US. So just to begin, we have to consider that the commission is made up of primarily close US allies and even a NATO member state.

Now that we've established who is running the commission, let's start looking at sources. The commission relied on two main types of sources, defectors and secondary human rights organizations. Perhaps most telling about this report is not what it says, but what it hides. The report states that it made efforts to determine the credibility of witnesses, but offers no specifics on the process. The report makes *no mention* of the fact that the SK govt (through the Ministry of Unification) PAYS defectors six figure

Therefore the reader has no basis of knowing which source may or may not have received money from the South Korean government. SK recently boosted the reward to over $800,000.

At least one source was found to have lied about key parts of his testimony, Shin Dong-hyuk. Shin was touted as the star witness of the commission during his hearing. North Korean defector changes story after seeing father in video

Rather than retracting Shin's testimony, it remains a key part of the report and his original testimony is still on the UN website, with no revision. Commissioner Michael Kirby demonstrated his desire to see testimony meet his desired outcome by offering this weak defense:

Yes, because when your star witness inexplicably "lies" (or made up) key parts of their testimony for nine years, and then writes a book about it (the title of which is part of the lie!) you can definitely say this person is "not a fraud"

Unfortunately the vast majority of testimony came from anonymous individuals. The most serious allegations are all based on anonymous testimony, so independent verification is impossible to do. Now let's take a look some of the most commonly cited secondary sources, experts and NGOs. What we find is that many of the most important sources are linked to either the South Korean government, US government or NATO.

One of the most important statistics in the report is the estimate for the total population of the "prison camps." The estimate is between 80k to 100k. Source: Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) and NKDB. NKDB is a South Korean organization with such impartial board members as a former member of the South Korean intelligence service

One of the other heavily used sources is this organization which got an award from the US govt funded National Endowment for Democracy.. which means they most certainly get funding from them.

I'll summarize this for now: the report was run by close US allies, relied heavily on sources likely paid for by the SK govt, used secondary sources with close ties to SK intelligence, NATO and the US govt, and decontextualized the conflict.