Audio of UN Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn’s Special Address to PSCORE

Updated below.

As Joshua mentioned previously, UN Special Rapporteur on North Korean Human Rights, Vitit Muntarbhorn, spoke in Seoul to a PSCORE seminar April 30th during North Korea Freedom Week. His talk was entitled, “Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: Retrospect, Aspects and Prospects.”

I used my camera to record the audio, but I didn’t get the first few minutes because I was busy taking photos. Listening to him talk, you very quickly get a sense of his passion and energy, which explain how it is he’s been able to produce — on a pro bono basis — two reports a year for the last six years.

Rapporteur Muntarbhorn also was quite accessible. In fact, unlike many of the afternoon’s speakers (who understandably no doubt had busy schedules), he planted himself in the front row after his talk and stayed for the whole seminar. During breaks many of us had the chance to chat with him. Definitely not a UN bureaucrat!

Each part runs about 10 minutes. For those of you who prefer to read a write-up of the speech, Lauren does a great job covering it on her blog.

To read the special rapporteur’s reports, go to http://www.ohchr.org/EN/countries/AsiaRegion/Pages/KPIndex.aspx and click the links under the heading, “Most recent Special Procedures’ reports.”

Update:
Here’s the program from the seminar (PDF) — included are Rapporteur Muntarbhorn’s prepared remarks. See pages 4-14.

The title of the seminar was, “The North Korean Human Rights Bill: A Discussion of Future Government and NGO Use.” (Note, this is a bill that has not passed yet.) In the program you will find English versions of a couple of other speaker’s remarks on that topic as well: Kim Tae-hoon, a commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, and Jang Bok-hee, a professor at Sunmoon University.