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Category: Human Rights

November 7, 2006

Kang Chol Hwan Selected as One of Time’s ‘Asian Heroes’

In person,  Kang is unimpressive.  Like  all of the North Koreans I’ve met, he’s strikingly  small, frail, reserved, and downcast.  One fears that some loud noise might frighten him off.  He makes a  deeper impression through the written word: At 10, Kang and his family had already spent a year in Yodok, a North Korean labor camp, sent there because his grandfather, a manager at a state-owned agency, had been accused of disloyalty to the regime of the late dictator...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
November 7, 2006

Oil-for-Slaves

This was in my in-box from Human Rights Without Frontiers today: The North Korean government is paying for oil imported from Russia by dispatching forced labour at zero cost since it has no other way to pay in goods or services. This was confirmed by the investigations of independent journalists, a professor of the Far Eastern Research Centre of Vladivostok and members of the Russian government. According to statistics of the local administration of Primorsky city, Pyongyang’s oil imports increased...

Categories Human Rights/Russia/Russia & Korea
November 6, 2006

New Human Rights Chair: ‘I Can No Longer Remain Silent’ on N. Korean Abuses

Bloggers are moths to the flame of irony, and South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission has  been  a reliable beacon for  K-bloggers in need of prime material.  For at least the last two years, we’ve  cringed and laughed our way through its pickayune inquiries into adolescent  hairstyles and dairies while 23 million other Korean citizens’ mass starvation, suffocating oppression, and mass enslavement went pretty much unmentioned.  The HRC is nominally independent of the elected goverment, but pretty clearly, politics was...

Categories Human Rights/Korean Law/Korean Politics
November 4, 2006

‘Crimes Against Humanity:’ DLA Piper’s Report Is the Ultimate Must-Read on North Korean Human Rights

You may recall my recent post on the New York Times Op-Ed by Vaclav Havel, Elie Wiesel, and Kjell Magne Bondevik to treat the North Korean crisis as a human rights issue. One of the founding beliefs that inspired me to start OFK is that the issues are inseparable. Only a regime with so little regard for human life and dignity would allow its people to starve by the millions and divert those resources to weapons of mass murder. That...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
October 30, 2006

Must-Read: NYT Op-Ed by Havel, Wiesel & Bondevik Calls on U.N. to ‘Turn North Korea Into a Human Rights Issue’

The authors,  Vaclav Havel, Elie Wiesel, and former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik have co-authored a powerful argument  for confronting  Kim Jong Il’s atrocities against the North Korean people, which they call “one of the most egregious human-rights and humanitarian disasters in the world today.” They also call for a  “renewed international effort to ameliorate the crisis facing the country’s citizens:” For more than a decade, many in the international community have argued that to focus on the suffering of...

Categories "United" Nations/Europe/Human Rights/The Camps
October 29, 2006

U.N. Report on Human Rights in North Korea

Human Rights Without Frontiers forwards this report on human rights in North Korea  from the U.N. General Assembly (north_korea_u1_2006.pdf).  On the surface, it’s slathered with diplo-lard, but wipe that off and you can see some fairly strong language. In addition, it cannot be overstated that the excessive expenditure by the authorities on its defence sector based upon the country’s “military-first” policy causes serious distortions in the national budget and its use of national resources; it is a key impediment to...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
October 27, 2006

Must Read: International Crisis Group on N. Korean Refugees

It’s probably the most comprehensive and detailed report I’ve yet seen on the subject, and from a non-partisan and balanced group.  The most  immediately relevant  point is that things could soon get much worse: Even without a strong response to the 9 October 2006 nuclear test that targets the North’s economy, the internal situation could soon get much worse. The perfect storm may be brewing for a return to famine in the North. Last year, Pyongyang reintroduced the same public...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Refugees
October 23, 2006

First Act, Last Laugh, Part 2

I have a message  for whomever tried to stop “Yoduk Story” from playing in Seoul:  read, weep, and know that you have failed. “Whomever,” according to producer Jung Sung-San and the daily Chosun Ilbo (which backed YS), is  someone  in the South Korean government.  Eventually, the South Korean government got around to denying this.  Personally, I wasn’t there.  All I can say is that the accusation is  consistent with other things the South Korean government has done to  cover for...

Categories Censorship/Human Rights/Korean Society
October 23, 2006

U.N. Envoy: N. Korea Sends Handicapped to Camps

[Update:   Welcome Powerline readers!] Since I began blogging about North Korea, one of my core philosophies  has been  that nukes, diplomacy, and human rights aren’t logically separable. That’s because you deal with governments that possess a basic regard for human life differently from those that lack one. Governments in the first category share our desire to preserve life by avoiding war. Governments in the second category seek only to preserve and expand their own power; their motivations are not...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/The Camps
October 23, 2006

Ban Ki-Moon’s Image Makeover?

Already, Ban can see that what was popular in Seoul won’t cut it in the General Assembly.  In the rest of the world, North Korea is a pariah.  Besides, the man is highly sensitive about what bloggers say about him. “Taking the advantage of the U.N. Secretary-general’s authority and the U.N.’s functions, I plan to make the utmost efforts to actually improve the human rights situation in North Korea,” he said. Citing reports from U.N. human rights envoys and related...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
October 19, 2006

Interview: L. Gordon Flake, Executive Director, Mansfield Foundation

Gordon Flake (bio)  is two things that make his opinions interesting and valuable to me.  First, he’s a fluent Korean speaker, and those of us who aren’t are always at some disadvantage to those who do when we are gathering the facts we process into our views.  Second — and Gordon may not agree with this characterization — his views  strike me as classically  liberal. His views are probably more independent and less jaundiced by partisan bias or  ambitions  than...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Blogs & Blogging/Famine & Food Aid/Google Earth/Human Rights/Korean Politics/Korean Society/Media Criticism/NK Economics/Proliferation/Refugees/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
October 16, 2006

Alleged Chinese Documents Reveal Depth of N. Korean Refugees’ Suffering

I can’t verify the documents’ authenticity, of course. That’s the natural advantage that comes with being China, North Korea, or any other opaque dictatorship — you can deny anything without having to let anyone search for the truth. Deniability in the narrower sense is always plausible. In the greater sense, it isn’t. This Wall Street Journal report merely adds some detail, and expands some of the parameters, of what we already know. The Border Police document, dated Jan. 10, 2005,...

Categories China/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Refugees
October 1, 2006

La Place Des Miserables: 39.713N, 126.895E

This is one district, called Pyongchang-ri, of the infamous Camp 15, now known worldwide as Yodok. Here, according to survivors, children labor, starve, sicken, and die beside their parents — thousands of them each year. The entire camp is massive, and not all of it is within Google Earth’s high-resolution coverage. This picture gives a partial overview; you can see another photograph of this district here, and more photos here.  Yodok was the place Kang Chol-Hwan documented in “The Aquariums...

Categories Google Earth/Human Rights/Korean Society/The Camps
September 30, 2006

Guild of Liars, Part 2: North Korean Refugees Expose the Lies of the National Lawyers’ Guild

[Updated]   Kudos to the Bar Assocation for doing what the cowardly and  politicized National  Human Rights Commission won’t. The report included testimony similar to that in papers issued by Amnesty International and other rights groups, describing forced abortions and infanticide in North Korea’s political prisons. The bar association report was the first of its kind, although the group issues annual reports on human rights in the South. It was issued against a backdrop of criticism by rights activists of...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Korean Law
September 26, 2006

Head of S. Korea’s Human Right Commission Resigns

Shortly after the HRC refused to speak up on behalf of a North Korean facing public execution, its head  has resigned. Yesterday, at a meeting with commission members, one of them asked Mr. Cho why he walked out of a workshop suddenly on Friday.  He said only, “I think it is now time for me to resign. I have nothing more to say.”  He then left the meeting.  A commission official who asked not to be named said, “I heard...

Categories Human Rights/Korean Politics