Probe into vagrant abuse sought

S. Korea human rights body: Govt failed to protect detainees

SEOUL: A South Korean commission has urged lawmakers to investigate the enslavement and mistreatment of thousands of people at a vagrants’ facility during the 1970s and ‘80s.

The country’s dictators ordered round-ups to “purify” the streets, sending the homeless, disabled and children to facilities where they were forced to work.

No one has been held accountable for the hundreds of deaths, rapes and beatings that The Associated Press documented at the now-closed Brothers Home, a huge mountainside compound in Busan that had the largest of dozens of those facilities.

The AP report in 2016 was based on hundreds of exclusive documents and interviews with officials and former detainees.

The National Human Rights Commission yesterday recommended that lawmakers pass a special law to initiate an investigation. It also called for the government to sign and ratify a United Nations convention against forced disappearance.

Many of the Brothers inmates were brought there amid aggressive drives by Seoul’s then-military leaders to beautify city streets by removing “undesirables” as they prepared to bid for and host the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Many former inmates say they were held without their families’ knowledge, claims backed by official records that show authorities exercised little discretion in whom they chose to confine.

At the time, officials justified the confinements by a 1975 government directive that ordered police and local officials to round up vagrants.

But the commission said yesterday that even under the legal standards of those times, the government failed to protect the fundamental rights of inmates as the directive violated the constitution.

Brothers was shut down after a prosecutor exposed the facility in early 1987.