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March 25, 2014

Samantha Power, North Korea is your Rwanda

Now that anyone who cares has digested the U.N. Commission of Inquiry’s report on North Korea, the conversation has turned to a more practical question: So what? The E.U. and Japan are reportedly drafting a resolution for consideration by the Security Council that would (1) condemn North Korea for its crimes, (2) call “for its leaders to face international justice,” (3) impose travels sanctions on specific leaders deemed responsible, and (4) refer the COI report to the International Criminal Court....

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Human Rights/Six-Party Talks
March 24, 2014

For China, holocaust denial substitutes for diplomacy

It’s offensively obtuse things like this that convince me that Chinese will eventually be as despised in North Korea as Japan is despised in South Korea, and that its profiteers won’t be safe to walk the streets of Rajin:  “The inability of the commission to get support and cooperation from the country concerned makes it impossible for the commission to carry out its mandate in an impartial, objective and effective manner,” said Chen Chuandong, a counselor at China’s mission in...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Human Rights
March 23, 2014

Event tomorrow on the COI report

I apologize for the short notice, but tomorrow at 2:45 p.m., the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the Foreign Policy Initiative will co-sponsor an event: “North Korea’s Human Rights Violations – What Next After the U.N. Commission of Inquiry Report?,” at Room 106 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Melanie Kirkpatrick and Christopher Griffin will moderate, and panelists will include Hyeonsoo Lee, Roberta Cohen, and Greg Scarlatoiu.

Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Human Rights
March 19, 2014

The U.N. Panel of Experts is starting to follow Kim Jong Un’s money.

The main headlines that will come of the U.N. Panel of Experts’ new report on the enforcement of North Korea sanctions will mostly cover the Chong Chon Gang incident — the large amount of weapons seized, the brazenness of its deception, and the complexity of its corporate and financial links to entities operating from Russia, Singapore, and China. There has been relatively little attention paid to the newly revealed evidence that North Korea has helped Syria and Iran arm terrorists....

Categories "United" Nations/Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 17, 2014

POE Part 2: Terrorist rockets that landed in Israel may have had N. Korean fuses

When the Syria collapsed into civil war in 2011, Hamas and other Sunni Palestinians broke with their sponsors in Damascus for sectarian reasons, while Hezbollah sent troops to defend the Assad regime. But in 2009, before the civil war, Assad and his own backers in Iran armed both Hamas and Hezbollah. The year 2009 was a big one for interceptions of North Korean weapons bound for Iran and its terrorist clients. The UAE found rocket propelled grenades and explosives inside...

Categories "United" Nations/Terrorism (NK)
March 11, 2014

U.N. Panel of Experts releases new report on N. Korea sanctions enforcement

The report, which you can find here, publishes photographs and a detailed description of the weapons seized from the Chong Chon Gang. I had not realized how big the shipment was: 72. The Panel found that the hidden cargo (see figure XI, a complete list at annex VII and detailed analysis at annex VIII) amounted to six trailers associated with surface-to-air missile systems and 25 shipping containers loaded with two disassembled MiG-21 aircraft, 15 engines for MiG-21 aircraft, components for...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
February 17, 2014

U.N. Commission finds North Korea committed crimes against humanity, will recommend referral to the International Criminal Court

After years of apathy that not even accomplished appeaser Ban Ki-Moon could enforce, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry has released a devastating report accusing Kim Jong Un and his late father, Kim Jong Il, of crimes against humanity. You can download a summary report, or the long version, here. I will probably have more to say about the report in the coming days as I read it, but it’s clearly having an immediate and profound impact on the public discourse....

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
November 4, 2013

Witnesses: North Korea culpable for famine deaths

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry for North Korea has done excellent and necessary work collecting testimony about the regime’s political prison camps. Michael Kirby, the Commission’s Chairman, has earned the eternal gratitude of the Korean people for his forthrightness, and friends of mine who met him during the COI’s session in Washington last week tell me they were deeply impressed with both Kirby and Sonja Biserko (the third commissioner, Marzuki Darusman, who performed admirably as the U.N. Special Rapporteur, fell ill...

Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Famine & Food Aid
September 3, 2013

Camp 22 Update

In an update to its previous imagery analysis, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea seems to be migrating to the view that Camp 22 was closed in 2012, but if that’s the answer, the next question it raises is what happened to the prisoners there, once estimated to number as high as 30,000. The Washington Post asks that question in an editorial today: In a way, the camp was a city in its own right, albeit a locus of inhumanity rather...

Categories "United" Nations/The Camps
August 27, 2013

European NGOs protest enforcement of U.N. sanctions, but not the millions Kim Jong Un wastes on European luxuries

Last week, the Swiss government announced that it had blocked an attempt by North Korea to buy $7.24 million worth of ski lifts, plus “golf, horseback riding and water sports” gear. That this transaction was beneath even the Swiss is saying something. Switzerland is near the top of any list of countries suspected of hosting North Korean slush funds that are variously estimated to be worth between $1 billion and $4 billion. Throughout the duration of a famine that, according for former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, killed...

Categories "United" Nations/Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
March 14, 2013

What will a U.N. inquiry on N. Korean human rights actually mean?

The U.N. Human Rights Council is set to approve an inquiry into human rights conditions in North Korea, conditions that a U.N. investigator says “may” be crimes against humanity: Marzuki Darusman, an investigator for the United Nations, is expected to present a report to the council urging the creation of an international commission of inquiry to follow up on the abuses recorded in the eight years that a United Nations official has monitored human rights in the North.  [N.Y. Times] So,...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
March 11, 2013

Chinese banks host massive slush funds for Kim Jong Un despite “tough” new U.N. resolution

So over the weekend, I read U.N. Security Council Resolution 2094, and I didn’t see much that deviated from the low expectations I expressed based on the press reports.  (Since then, Marcus Noland has expressed a similarly pessimistic view). For those nations that are interested in strict enforcement, there is useful material in this; for example, the reference to the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, which you can find on Page 13 of this document, will cause some nations to be more circumspect about...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea
March 7, 2013

Plan B Watch: China’s U.N. Bait-and-Switch

We’ve seen enough of China’s past conduct when it comes to U.N. resolutions aimed at North Korean proliferation that we ought to recognize duplicity when we see it.  We should also know by now that our hapless U.N. Ambassador isn’t very good at recognizing that duplicity.  That’s why the news that China is expected to vote for another U.N. Security Council resolution this morning underwhelms me.  I even think I have a pretty good  idea what China’s game is here. Like I said before — China...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Sanctions
March 5, 2013

Park Geun Hye will back human rights probe of North Korea

You don’t need a Ph.D. to see that North Korea is gearing up to test Park Geun-Hye. The nice people at the quasi-official, Japan-based Chosun Sinbo reacted to Park’s inauguration speech, in which she called on North Korea to disarm, by saying they were “unable to hide our rage.” Domestically, the North has launched another series of exhausting war exercises, with soldiers forced to live days on end in tunnels, or standing guard and catching frostbite outdoors. All of this...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
February 9, 2013

U.N. may investigate N. Korean officials for crimes against humanity

I don’t know what’s gotten into the U.N. lately, but this would be a pretty big deal: North Korea’s leaders are likely to be the target of a U.N. investigation into their personal responsibility for rapes, torture, executions, arbitrary arrests and abductions, following an expert report published on Tuesday. The report by Marzuki Darusman, an Indonesian lawyer who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said North Korea’s “grave, systematic and widespread” human rights violations ought to...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
January 27, 2013

Why Susan Rice’s new Security Council resolution is a great victory … for China and North Korea

The Obama Administration spin on the long-stalled U.N. Security Council Resolution 2087 is that it “tightened” U.N. sanctions against North Korea, and that securing China’s vote for that resolution represents some sort of diplomatic accomplishment for the U.S. and Susan Rice. Despite China’s rejection of proposals by the United States to add new sanctions, the Obama administration sought to characterize the vote as a tough response. “This resolution demonstrates to North Korea that there are unanimous and significant consequences for its...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
January 18, 2013

Xi Jinping Outsources Meeting With Park Geun-Hye to His Food Taster

China’s unhelpful behavior in the Security Council would have been reason enough for Park Geun Hye to follow the example of Shinzo Abe,* who deferred meeting with Chinese officials and instead met with the leaders of “countries sharing the same values, such as democracy and the rule of law.”  In retrospect, that might have been best: In her meeting with China’s Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun yesterday, President-elect Park Geun-hye said North Korea’s nuclear weapons development cannot be tolerated and that Seoul...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Diplomacy
January 16, 2013

Ya Think? U.N. human rights chief suspects “crimes against humanity” in prison camp called “North Korea”

Nearly seven years after Jared Genser’s Failure to Protect and nearly nine years after David Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag, a senior U.N. official has gotten around to calling for “an in depth investigation” of what “may amount to crimes against humanity” in North Korea’s prison camps, and elsewhere in the larger prison sometimes called “The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea:” U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay called on Monday for an international investigation into what she said may be crimes against humanity in North Korea, including torture...

Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Human Rights/The Camps