NORTH Korea's highest court has begun hearing the case against two US journalists accused of entering the country illegally and engaging in "hostile acts" – charges that could land them ten years in a labour camp.
Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for former US vice president Al Gore's California-based Current TV, were arrested on 17 March near the North Korean border while on a reporting trip to China.
North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency sai
d in a brief dispatch the trial had begun yesterday.
The North has told the US that no observers, including Swedish officials who act as the US protecting power in the capital Pyongyang, would be allowed to watch. The trial comes at a time of mounting tensions on the Korean peninsula following the regime's provocative nuclear test on 25 May.
With discussions continuing at the United Nations and in Washington on how to punish the regime for its defiance, there were fears the women could become political pawns in the stand-off with Pyongyang.
Analyst Choi Eun-suk, a professor of North Korean law at Kyungnam University, said the court could convict the women and then the government could use them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the US.
"The North is likely to release and deport them to the US – if negotiations with the US go well," Mr Choi said.
North Korea and the US, former Korean War foes, do not have diplomatic relations, and analysts called Pyongyang's recent tests a bid to grab President Barack Obama's attention. Pyongyang "believes the Obama administration has not made North Korea a priority," said David Straub of Stanford University's Korean studies programme.
Back home, the reporters' families pleaded for clemency. "All we can do is hope the North Korean government will show leniency," Ms Ling's sister, TV journalist Lisa Ling, said in an emotional plea at a California vigil. "If they committed a transgression, then our families are deeply, deeply sorry. We know the girls are sorry as well."
She urged Washington and Pyongyang not to let politics dictate the reporters' fate.
"Tensions are so heated, and the girls are essentially in the midst of this nuclear stand off," she said. She urged the governments to "try to communicate, to try and bring our situation to a resolution on humanitarian grounds."
State-run media have not defined the exact charges against them, but South Korean legal experts said conviction for "hostility" or espionage could mean five to ten years in a labour camp. Mr Choi said a ruling by the top court would be final.
The circumstances of their arrest were not clear. The Current TV team were at the Chinese border city of Yanji to report on the trafficking of North Korean women, Lisa Ling said. They were seized somewhere near the frozen Tumen River dividing North Korea and China.
For weeks, there was little word about their condition iin one of the world's most isolated nations. Sweden's ambassador to North Korea has visited the women and brought back a letter from Laura Ling saying she "cried so much" at first but was passing the time doing stretches and meditating.
The full article contains 535 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
