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Canadian pastor gets life in NK jail
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A North Korean court has sentenced a Canadian pastor to life imprisonment with hard labor, while rejecting a prosecution call for the death penalty after his conviction on sedition charges.
South Korean-born Hyeon Soo Lim, pastor at the Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Toronto, is the latest in a series of foreign missionaries to be arrested, deported or jailed for allegedly meddling in state affairs.
“The defendant Lim admitted all the charges against him, including viciously defaming our system and our supreme dignity as well as plotting to overthrow our state,” the official Korean Central News Agency said.
According to KCNA, the prosecutor had asked the Supreme Court to hand down a death sentence, arguing that the pastor’s crimes merited “the sternest punishment.”
Lim was detained by North Korean authorities in January after arriving from China. The specific actions that resulted in the sedition allegations have never been detailed.
According to his church, he was on a purely humanitarian mission and had visited the country on numerous occasions to support work with orphanages and nursing homes.
In August, North Korea released a video showing Lim attending a Sunday service at Pyongyang’s Pongsu Church and confessing to various charges in an address to a small congregation that included a number of foreigners. “I committed the gravest crime of insulting and defaming the top dignity and the leadership of the republic,” Lim said in the video.
Detained foreigners are habitually required to make public and officially scripted pronouncements of their guilt in order to help secure their eventual release.
“The trial demonstrated again what kind of miserable fate awaits people like Lim — the followers of the US and South Korean regimes that ceaselessly try to annihilate our socialist system and defame the supreme dignity of our sacred republic,” KCNA said.
A number of Christian missionaries — mostly ethnic Koreans who are United States citizens — have been arrested in the past, with some of them only allowed to return home after intervention by high-profile US political figures.
In November last year Kenneth Bae — a US citizen who, like Lim, was born in South Korea — was released two years after being sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor.
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