My, How Times Have Changed: Human Rights Edition
South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission made itself infamous during the Roh years for the tangled logic by which it condemned America for overthrowing the genocidal Saddam Hussein, yet concluded that North Korea’s concentration camps, infanticides, smothering repression, and starvation of its subject were none of its concern. To the few of us who were then paying attention to any of this, the HRC became an international laughingstock and a symbol of the Korean left’s hypocritical anti-Americanism, its easy collaboration with evil, and its lack of any real compassion for the North Korean people.
Today, however, the HRC is under new management, and it has just given its “ROK Human Rights Award” to NK Net, an organization composed of North Korean defectors and concerned South Koreans. It is also the founder of the Daily NK, which is rapidly gaining international acceptance as one of the world’s premier sources of information from inside North Korea:
An NHRC spokesperson revealed the reason why it selected NKnet at this morning’s Human Rights Awards ceremony, “NKnet has founded an online newspaper on North Korea, The Daily NK, and consistently launches campaigns, forums and international conferences on North Korean human rights in order to release the reality of North Korea to the world and contribute to the advancement of defector human rights by supporting defectors’ organizations.
In his speech at the ceremony, NHRC Chairman Hyun Byung Chul selected the North Korean human rights issue as one of the key human rights problems that Korea is facing and must solve, along with the advancement of children and the rights of old people, prevention of discrimination against social minorities and the practical guarantee of basic freedoms.
President of the Korean Bar Association Kim Pyong Woo also gave a congratulatory address, in which he pointed out, “There are many problems created by discrimination, prejudice, alienation and exclusion, but several NGOs and the administration are working on them. Therefore, they can be improved or solved. However, the most serious problem is the one thing that we have not all yet become aware of and cannot throw away our prejudices against. That is the problem of the North Korean people and defectors’ human rights.
NKnet President Han Ki Hong told reporters after the ceremony, “I think NKnet won this prize on the behalf of all the other NGOs which are also working for the advancement of North Korean human rights. I hope all the people in the South can make a concerted effort to improve the North’s terrible human rights situation. [Daily NK]
Those who would suppress any mention of the North’s atrocities never really went away, of course. Outside the Seoul Press Center where the award ceremony was held, ten North Korean agents members of the “Seoul Unification Solidarity” protested against the award.
Congratulations to NK Net. To be sure, the Lee Administration has had a mixed record on refugee policy in particular, and the HRC is nominally independent of the government, but what person of at least average intelligence and compassion can’t welcome a Korean Human Rights Commission that’s actually interested in human rights for all Koreans?
Disclosure: I’ve written a few columns for the Daily NK myself. Why did I stop? Time, mostly. I regret it, but I just fell out of the habit from sheer exhaustion. You can read my interview with the Daily NK’s Han Ki Hong here. But again, I am deeply gratified to see the North Korean people themselves — for they make up much of the Daily NK’s staff and sources — rising to the vanguard of their own liberation.