Some Human Rights Updates

The Korea Times reports that a joint committee of the U.S. Congress has recommended that the government establish a special task force aimed at persuading the Chinese to stop repatriating North Korean refugees. On the less hopeful side, we still don’t have a clear idea of how much priority the executive branch is going to give this issue, and to phrase this gently, I don’t expect Hillary Clinton’s policies to be unduly influenced by sentimental considerations.

The commission recommends appropriating funds to offset the costs that China would incur from a more humane treatment of the refugees, but who really believes that China’s inhumanity here is about money (as opposed to keeping Korea divided into two states, one a vassal and one a neutral)? And since I’m on the topic of China’s brutality, this video is a fine illustration of that:

Members of the bipartisan commission include such stalwarts as Rep. Ed Royce and Sen. Sam Brownback, so there’s reason to have confidence in its motives.

The KT also reports that a U.N. panel has recommended approval of a resolution calling on North Korea to make its human rights record less abysmal. Positive: South Korea was a proponent of the resolution. Negative: America wasn’t, and the U.N. is irrelevant anyway.