North Korean women face China family dilemma

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean women who flee to China end up in a bureaucratic trap where their children are denied access to public education unless they are willing to risk breaking up their families, a report on Monday said.

"China's continuing arrest and summary repatriation of North Korean women leaves some families of mixed Chinese and North Korean parents with an awful choice," said the report from the non-governmental agency, Human Rights Watch.

China requires children to be entered into an official family registry in order to go to public schools. But when Chinese and North Koreans register their children, they run the risk of exposing the mother, who then faces arrest and deportation, the report said (here).

Most of these parents keep their children out of school in order to keep their families together, the report said.

Various rights groups estimate thousands to tens of thousands North Korean women have fled to China to escape poverty at home and then married Chinese. Many of them were trafficked by brokers who forced them into marriages with farmers on the other side of the border.

From November 2007 to January 2008, Human Rights Watch spoke to people in these mixed nationality marriages living in Chinese border cities. Many of the North Korean women fled due to a famine at home in the mid 1990s, married Chinese men and now have children who are of school age.

"We have a seven-year-old son. I never committed any crime. It really worries me that he can't go to school," one 42-year-old woman from North Korea was quoted by the group as saying.

Chinese officials were not immediately available for comment.

China, fearful of a potential flood of North Korean fleeing the destitute state, typically classifies North Korean border crossers as economic migrants, rather than refugees, and forcibly repatriates them.

"China has nothing to gain by having a growing number of uneducated children," said Elaine Pearson, Asia deputy director at Human Rights Watch.

Various human rights groups have said once a North Korean is repatriated, they face imprisonment at camps where torture is frequent and many prisoners face a high possibility of death due to the brutal conditions.

The U.S. State Department said in a report last month that North Korea had increased punishments for those trying to flee the desperately poor state from what had typically been a few months in prison to a few years.

(Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng in Beijing; Editing by Nick Macfie)