Update: Same topic at the Marmot’s.

Original Post: The IHT has an interesting article the re-hashes the problem of North Korean’s who’ve defected to South Korea being denied the ability to divorce their spouses in North Korea.

This also highlights an inconsistency in South Korean law, since the constitution considers those in the DPRK to be ROK citizens. Allowing the defectors to divorce their North Korean spouses shouldn’t get the ROK administration into any hot water with the North, so why the block is a good question.

Some excerpts:

Since 2003, 220 North Korean defectors have filed for divorce in South Korean courts. In the first and only ruling of its kind, a judge in the Seoul Family Court granted a divorce in 2004 to a woman who had defected. But judges have since suspended all the other cases, which were mired in a thicket of legal riddles.

[…]

“I am still young; I need a husband to depend on and ask for advice and work with,” said Kim, who filed for divorce in January. “But they are telling me that I cannot marry again. I thought I would be free once I get to South Korea. But I am still shackled to my life in the North.”

Many defectors who had married in their Communist homeland are living with new partners they found among other defectors and South Koreans. They produce children, yet cannot marry. A bill that would allow South Korean courts to grant divorce to the defectors has been stalled in Parliament for two years.

“Since that first ruling in 2004, there has been criticism of the ruling, and voices have grown among judges that we should become more cautious about these cases,” said Justice Shi Jin Kuk of Seoul Family Court. “We hope that Parliament will enact the bill soon. I wonder how long courts can delay ruling on the cases.”

[…]

“Even after they become South Korean citizens, many defectors cannot concentrate on their new lives here,” Park said. “There is, for example, a man I know who is still wandering all over China, searching for his wife lost to human traffickers.”

[…]

Kim feared returning to North Korea, where the totalitarian regime views leaving the country as a political crime punishable by incarceration in a labor camp, even if the motive for leaving was economic or a matter of survival.

Kim also found life in China too attractive to give up. “The biggest shock I have had since leaving North Korea was when I first saw a stack of corn in China and saw them actually feeding it to pigs, not to people,” she said.

Read the rest here.