Michael Kirby (L), chairman of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on North Korea, poses a question to Shin Dong-hyuk (R), a former North Korean defector, during a public hearing at Yonsei university in Seoul August 20, 2013. 
 
 SEOUL Public executions and torture are daily occurrences in North Korea's prisons, according to dramatic testimony from former inmates at a U.N. Commission of Inquiry that opened in South Korea's capital on Tuesday. 
 
 This is the first time that the North's human rights record has been examined by an expert panel, although the North, now ruled by a third generation of the founding Kim family, denies that it abuses human rights. It refuses to recognize the commission and has denied access to investigators. 
 
 Harrowing accounts from defectors now living in South Korea related how guards chopped off a man's finger, forced inmates to eat frogs and a mother to kill her own baby. 
 
 "I had no idea at all ... I thought my whole hand was going to be cut off at the wrist, so I felt thankful and grateful that only my finger was cut off," said Shin Dong-hyuk, punished for dropping a sewing machine. 
 
 Born in a prison called Camp 14 and forced to watch the execution of his mother and brother whom he turned in for his own survival, Shin is North Korea's best-known defector and camp survivor. He said he believed the U.N. panel was the only way to improve human rights in the isolated and impoverished state. 
 
 "Because the North Korean people cannot stand up with guns like Libya and Syria ... I personally think this is the first and last hope left," Shin said. "There is a lot for them to cover up, even though they don't admit to anything." 
 
 There are a 150,000-200,000 people in North Korean prison camps, according to independent estimates, and defectors say many inmates are malnourished or worked to death. 
 
 After more than a year and a half ruling North Korea, Kim Jong Un, 30, has shown few signs of changing the rigid rule of his father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, state founder Kim Il Sung. Neither have there been signs of a thaw or loss of control inside the tightly controlled state. 
 
 Jee Heon-a, 34, told the Commission that from the first day of her incarceration in 1999, she discovered that salted frogs were one of the few things to eat. 
 
 "Everyone's eyes were sunken. They all looked like animals. Frogs were hung from the buttons of their clothes, put in a plastic bag and their skins peeled off," she said. "They ate salted frogs and so did I." 
 
 Speaking softly, she took a deep breath when describing in detail how a mother was forced to kill her own baby. 
 
 "It was the first time I had seen a newborn baby and I felt happy. But suddenly there were footsteps and a security guard came in and told the mother to turn the baby upside down into a bowl of water," she said. 
 
 "The mother begged the guard to spare her, but he kept beating her. So the mother, her hands shaking, put the baby face down in the water. The crying stopped and a bubble rose up as it died. A grandmother who had delivered the baby quietly took it out." 
 
 "TOUGH NUT" 
 
 Few experts expect the commission to have an immediate impact on the rights situation, although it will serve to publicize a campaign that has little visibility globally. 
 
 "The U.N. has tried various ways to pressure North Korea over the years in the field of human rights, and this is a way to raise the pressure a bit," said Bill Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University in Britain. 
 
 "But it's obvious that North Korea is a tough nut to crack and the U.N.'s means are limited. There would need to be profound political changes in North Korea to make headway in the field of human rights." 
 
 But there appeared to be little interest in the issue in Seoul. Only a few dozen people, including journalists, attended the public hearing at a city center university. 
 
 Defectors are largely shunned or ignored in South Korea and eke out an existence in menial jobs, if they have them at all, according to official data. 
 
 Kim Jong Un stepped up the nuclear weapons and rocket programs launched by his father with a third nuclear test and two rocket launches and emphasizes the military in his speeches. 
 
 This year, he threatened the United States, South Korea and Japan with nuclear attack and although the country's bellicose moves were dismissed as empty rhetoric, Kim succeeded in driving tension on the divided Korean peninsula sharply higher. 
 
 The hope of many activists would be for the Kim dynasty to fall and for leaders in Pyongyang to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, although the U.N. commission says this is not possible for the moment. 
 
 On its website, the Commission said it was "not appropriate" to comment on any ICC jurisdiction over potential crimes against humanity as North Korea had not signed the statutes that would enable the court to prosecute. 
 
 But activists said word of the commission would seep into the North via unofficial contacts maintained by families. 
 
 "People living their daily lives here don't realize how important this is. It will have a tremendously powerful impact across North Korea," said Kim Sang-hun, chairman of Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, a South Korean group. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Thomas Escritt in AMSTERDAM and Stephanie Nebehay in GENEVA; Editing by David Chance and Ron Popeski) ||||| SEOUL, South Korea — Shin Dong-hyuk said his earliest memory of life in a North Korean prison camp was the public execution that inmates were forced to watch when he was 5 years old. Inmates, he told a hushed audience here in Seoul on Tuesday, were so hungry that they devoured live rats and the raw hooves of a goat that prison guards had thrown away after slaughtering the animal. 
 
 One 7-year-old girl was clubbed to death for stealing a few grains of wheat, Mr. Shin said. He said he felt lucky when a warden ordered the tip of his finger chopped off, rather than having him executed, for damaging a piece of sewing equipment. 
 
 “We toiled as bid and ate what they gave us, we took their beating and starved when they didn’t give us anything,” said Mr. Shin, 31, who escaped the camp in 2005. “We were expendables they were keeping as beasts of labor, to get the most out of us before we die.” 
 
 Mr. Shin’s account on Tuesday was dramatic, but not particularly new; over the years, defectors from North Korea, including a handful of survivors of its prison camps like Mr. Shin, have told similar stories in interviews, at human rights conferences and in documentaries and memoirs. What made the accounts given by Mr. Shin and another defector unusual was their audience: the first United Nations panel established to investigate allegations of human rights violations by the North Korean government. 
 
 The three-member Commission of Inquiry was started by the United Nations Human Rights Council in March with a one-year mandate to investigate what the council called allegations of “systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights,” including possible crimes against humanity, by the North Korean authorities. 
 
 The panel began five days of public hearings on Tuesday at Yonsei University in Seoul. It hoped to interview 30 North Korean defectors, including some who fled the country only recently. Later this month, another round of hearings is scheduled for Japan, where the fate of Japanese citizens abducted and taken to North Korea decades ago remains a keen concern. 
 
 “The panel decided to take public testimony to help raise international awareness of conditions in the country and because of a lack of response so far by the Pyongyang government” to repeated requests to visit North Korea, said Michael Donald Kirby, chairman of the commission. North Korea also has not responded to an invitation to attend the hearings, Mr. Kirby said. 
 
 The panel’s work is the international community’s most direct challenge to the young North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, over his country’s human rights record, which rights groups describe as appalling. It also represents a victory for North Korean defectors, many of whom, like Mr. Shin, have become vocal campaigners for human rights in the North, arguing that international preoccupation with the North’s missile and nuclear weapons programs should not divert attention from the people living under one of the most repressive systems in the world. 
 
 North Korea denies violating human rights and has rejected United Nations resolutions calling for better treatment of its people as a “political plot” to destabilize its government. 
 
 In a joint letter delivered to the panel on Tuesday, groups of North Korean defectors, including one called Free the NK Gulag, said they hoped that the inquiry would lead to the indictment of “Kim Jong-un and his clique” in the International Criminal Court. 
 
 “We ourselves or our family members were dragged into prisons without trial, we suffered unspeakable torture and humiliation when we were caught while trying to flee North Korea, and we had to witness neighbors and relatives dying while waiting for food rations,” their statement said. “We were forced to witness almost monthly public executions. Because of our grandfathers’ background, many of us were deprived of an opportunity to join the party or get jobs.” 
 
 Jee Heon-a, 34, the other defector who testified on Tuesday, said that during a famine in the late 1990s, North Korean women were sold to traffickers in China. Those later caught by the Chinese police were repatriated to the North. Many suffered forced miscarriages through beatings and other forms of torture from North Korean guards at detention facilities, and one woman who gave birth was forced to drown her baby, she said. 
 
 Mr. Kirby said his panel would “seek to determine whether crimes against humanity have occurred and who bears responsibility.” But he cautioned, “It is not possible at this moment to envisage the level of detail that the commission will be able to achieve in establishing lines of responsibility, if any.” 
 
 There was poignancy in the fact that Tuesday’s hearing was being held in South Korea. Here, North Korean human rights concerns have never elicited the kind of fervent activism seen in the days when South Koreans fought for their own rights under military dictatorships. Until recently, the authorities here feared that without an effective means of pressuring North Korea, openly challenging the North on human rights would only make it more repressive and less willing to engage in international efforts to denuclearize the country. 
 
 Mr. Shin, whose stories of his life in the North Korean labor camp — including watching his mother and brother be executed — are chronicled in the book “Escape from Camp 14” by Blaine Harden, said Tuesday that he had met people who questioned the veracity of his testimonies. He said he had no evidence except his accounts and the scars that he suffered from torture and from an electrified fence that he crossed to escape the camp. 
 
 “I want to speak for those children who were born and live in prison camps as I did, and for people who don’t even know what human rights are,” he said. “I hope that they can say they are hungry when they are hungry and say it’s painful if someone hurts them.” 
 
 The commission has identified nine suspected patterns of human rights violations to investigate, including denial of food, arbitrary detention and torture. 
 
 In its 2013 white paper on human rights in North Korea, the government-run Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul said between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners were held in five prison camps. Inside, “many inmates end up losing their life,” the paper said, because of “forced labor, torture, degrading mistreatment, poor nutrition and lack of medical care.” North Korea denies that such camps exist. 
 
 Also on Tuesday, the president of the international Red Cross, Peter Maurer, arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea, for the start of a visit to both countries, the organization said. Among the issues he will address in meetings with government officials will be the reunification of families who remain separated by the Korean War. 
 
 North Korea on Sunday accepted a South Korean proposal to discuss the reunion of elderly relatives.
– What's new are not the stories but the audience: Two North Korean defectors yesterday shared wrenching stories with the first UN panel assembled for the purpose of looking into human-rights violations in the country, reports the New York Times. The Commission of Inquiry's three members will spend a year looking into the allegations, and yesterday's testimony in Seoul marked the first of five days of such hearings, during which some 30 defectors are expected to speak. Among the first stories to be heard, per the Times and Reuters: The story getting the most press comes from Jee Heon-a, 34, who described a mother forced to kill her baby: "It was the first time I had seen a newborn baby and I felt happy. But ... a security guard came in and told the mother to turn the baby upside down into a bowl of water. The mother begged the guard to spare her, but he kept beating her. So the mother, her hands shaking, put the baby face down in the water. The crying stopped and a bubble rose up as it died." She also reported that North Korean women were sold to Chinese traffickers in the '90s. In her telling, one of the few available foods was salted frogs. Shin Dong-hyuk, 31, who broke out of a prison camp in 2005, witnessed "almost monthly public executions." A 7-year-old girl's punishment for stealing a bit of wheat? She was clubbed to death. Shin's punishment for dropping a sewing machine? The tip of his finger was severed; he describes himself as "grateful": "I thought my whole hand was going to be cut off at the wrist." Click for more from Shin.