The family of an American missionary kidnapped by North Korea found justice this week, with the help of a group of Israeli legal activists.
A federal district court in Washington, D.C., ordered the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to pay $330 million in damages to the family of Kim Dong Shik, a Presbyterian pastor kidnapped by agents 15 years ago.
He later died in a prison camp.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat Hadin, the Israeli group that represented Kim’s family, told the Jerusalem Post that the decision is a blow against “state sponsored terrorism.”
The family sued under the “terrorism exception” to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
“This is an important human rights decision that will be utilized in all political abduction cases going forward,” Darshan-Leitner told the Post.
The story of Kim’s abduction sounds like something out a Cold War spy novel.
Kim, a naturalized US citizen and father of seven, was kidnapped by North Korean spies while working with refugees in the Chinese border town of Yanji. At the time, he ran shelters and “The School of Love” for handicapped and refugee children whose families had escaped North Korea.
“The North Korean security service learned of Reverend Kim’s activities on behalf of the defectors and refugees and decided to kidnap him and bring him to North Korea to thwart his work on behalf of those who have escaped,” according to court documents.
A spy, codenamed “Lee Sun Hee,” befriended Kim and followed him around for 10 months. In January 2000, she invited Kim to dinner, offering to introduce him to some North Korean defectors.
Instead, according to court documents, Kim was attacked, forced into a cab, and spirited across the border into North Korea. He was never heard from again.
While in Korea, Kim was confined to a political penal-labor colony known as a “kwan-li-so,” according to court documents. There he was tortured and starved to death.
His wife told the Washington Post in 2005 that her husband dropped from 180 pounds to 75 pounds during his captivity. His body remains in North Korea.
In 2005, a group of Illinois politicians—including then US Senator Barack Obama—sent a letter to the North Korean ambassador, demanding information about Kim’s whereabouts. The letter compared him to Harriet Tubman and Raoul Wallenberg.
“We view Reverend Kim Dong-Shik as also being a hero who assisted with the escape of the powerless and forgotten,” they wrote.
Around the same time, a group of former North Korean spies admitted that their government had ordered Kim’s abduction, according to court documents. They also spoke with Kim’s family and revealed details of his kidnapping, imprisonment, torture, and death.
By 2008, Kim’s cause had largely been forgotten, according to the Washington Post.
Shurat Hadin, an Israeli NGO that specializes in legal cases involved terrorism, sued North Korea on behalf of Kim’s younger brother, Yong Seok Kim, and Kim’s son, Han Kim, the following year.
After North Korean officials failed to respond to the lawsuit, Kim’s family asked for a default judgement. A district court turned down that request, saying that Kim’s family had failed to prove that North Korea was responsible for Kim’s death.
An appeals court overturned that ruling in December.
The appeal judges argued that North Korea had a long history of abductions and torture.
They wrote:
Admissible record evidence demonstrates that North Korea abducted Reverend Kim, that it invariably tortures and kills political prisoners, and that through terror and intimidation it prevents any information about those crimes from escaping to the outside world. Requiring a plaintiff to produce direct, first-hand evidence of the victim’s torture and murder would thus thwart the purpose of the terrorism exception: holding state sponsors of terrorism accountable for torture and extrajudicial killing.
On April 9, the district court judge awarded $15 million in damages to each of the two Kims along with $300 million in punitive damages.
Asher Perlin, a lawyer the Kims, told the Washington Post that the family will likely try to collect money from North Korean assets that are frozen in the United States. In the future, North Korea may have to pay up.
“Even if there’s nothing there now,” Perlin told the Post, “at some point they’re going to want to come out of the cold. To do that, they will have to deal with judgments.”
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