Europe Takes Up N.K. Human Rights Mantle

The EU’s human rights dialogue with North Korea’s regime may be predictably “moribund,” but  a new report shows that Europe is outperforming the United States in accepting refugees:

Seven European nations have granted asylum to 280 North Korean defectors since the mid-1990s, Radio Free Asia reported on Saturday. RFA said Germany, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway gave asylum to 280 out of 700 North Korean refugees who applied there.

Germany topped the list, accepting 232 out of 455 North Korean asylum seekers between 1995 to 2005, while the U.K. accepted 25, Denmark seven, the Netherlands and Belgium six, Sweden five and Norway two.

And as for this supposed breakthrough in America’s admission of refugees?  VOA quotes an unnamed source as saying we’ll accept two hundred.  Two hundred people?   Are you kidding us?   That represents 0.4% of the State Department’s lowball estimate of the number of North Koreans now hiding in China (50,000; other estimates run closer to 300,000). 

The European Parliament will also hear testimony from North Korean refugees, who will describe what they went through in their homeland.  All of this will coincide with Freedom House’s Brussels Conference this March.  The European interest may be  creating something of a moral crisis for Korea, including the Korean left.  While  reflexively anti-American leftists can easily dismiss American activism  as part of a neocon conspiracy, quasi-socialist, Bush-hating  Europe is harder for them to ignore.  Even more significantly,  the growing global disapproval of South Korea’s collaboration with the  the oppression of half of Korea is an affront to its greatest vulnerability – its national pride.

In South Korea, left-wingers who once bristled when human rights in the North were brought up have started to catch up with the worldwide trend. The newly-appointed Democratic Labor Party chairman Moon Seong-hyun said in an interview with KBS on Sunday, “Human rights are a universal value and must be applied to all countries.” Even some on the New Left are having a change of heart, saying progressives, with their stress on rights and entitlement at home, can no longer ignore human rights abuses in the North.

While it’s unlikely that the left will split over human rights, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility, either.  It’s more likely that the issue will diminish the enthusiasm of Uri voters in the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.

Which reminds me – is anyone out there planning on being there, who would care to liveblog the Brussels conference for us?  Drop a comment telling us something of your experience with the NK human rights issue.