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Category: Human Rights

July 30, 2015

Obama Administration plans N. Korea human rights push at U.N., but is it too late?

Had you asked me two months ago how a deal between the Obama Administration and Iran would affect North Korea policy, I’d have answered that it would preoccupy Congress through September, and that after that, things would pick right up where they left off. How wrong I was. The Iran deal continues to dim the odds of another Agreed Framework with North Korea by drawing so many unflattering comparisons to the 1994 Agreed Framework as to destroy its legacy. Republicans...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
July 7, 2015

Can the UNHCR address North Korea’s human rights crisis, despite Ban Ki-Moon?

At long last, the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights has opened its new field office in Seoul. Its mandates will be as follows: Strengthen monitoring and documentation of the situation of human rights as steps towards establishing accountability in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Enhance engagement and capacity-building with the Governments of all States concerned, civil society and other stakeholders Maintain visibility of the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea including through sustained...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Human Rights
July 2, 2015

N. Korean biowar researcher defects, will testify about human experimentation

[Update, 4 Aug 2015: I inquired with well-connected friends in Europe about when this testimony was likely to take place. Those friends instead questioned the accuracy of Yonhap’s report. Last week, I wrote to a Yonhap correspondent, and asked whether Yonhap stands by the story. Although the correspondent passed my question along to the author of this report, I have not heard back from Yonhap. The lack of a response is further reason to question the accuracy of Yonhap’s story.]...

Categories Europe/Human Rights/The Camps/WMD
May 19, 2015

N. Korea calls S. Korea’s president a skirt-lifting, crotch-licking whore, just as Gloria Steinem arrives in Pyongyang

Gloria Steinem must have had her first reservations about “Women Cross DMZ” when the march’s organizer was outed as a North Korean apologist, and reporters began to ask her uncomfortable questions about North Korea’s war on women. Since then, Steinem has had to duck questions about the regime’s rape and murder of female prisoners, the endemic and unpunished rapes of North Korean women by its soldiers, and the infanticides and forced abortions this regime inflicts on North Korean refugee women and...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/North-South/Useful Idiocy
May 19, 2015

Need a round-trip ticket to Korea? Want to donate to a good cause? Look no further. (updated)

I’m posting this at the request of a friend in the North Korea Freedom Coalition: As you recall, Ambassador Jung-Hoon Lee, ROK Ambassador for Human Rights, offered contribute the following item to the silent auction on May 1: $1500 for the purchase of a voucher for a roundtrip fare from Washington, DC to Seoul. We did not find a buyer for this item on the night of the auction but Ambassador Lee has generously extended his offer. After speaking with...

Categories Activism
May 14, 2015

N. Korea’s expatriate labor needs ethical and financial limits

N. Korea increasingly relies on expat labor for hard currency A series of new reports suggests that the export of labor has become a major source of income for Pyongyang. The Financial Times cites an NGO estimate that the regime earns $1.5 to $2.3 billion a year from contract labor, in line with educated estimates of its annual revenue from missile sales ($1.5 billion) or arms deals with Iran ($1.5 billion to $2 billion). (Update: Marcus Noland questions that estimate,...

Categories Engagement/Human Rights/Kaesong/Russian Far East/Sanctions
May 1, 2015

The North Korean army’s rape problem, “Kangan” Province, and Gloria Steinem

It has been four whole days since I said I was done talking about Women Cross DMZ for a year. How foolish it was of me to write that. For one thing, I did not anticipate having this detailed history of Christine Ahn’s pro-North Korean views, which outdoes my own, to graf for you: In late April, WomenCrossDMZ held a press conference in New York City. Ahn was not in attendance to respond to our question of why the group omits...

Categories Human Rights/NK Military/Useful Idiocy
April 30, 2015

Why is North Korea still in the U.N.?

Oh, those wacky North Korean diplomats. If they aren’t shouting death threats in a U.S. congressional office building or making racial slurs against African diplomats, they’re smuggling dope, counterfeit money, or gold, or generally behaving like complete tools at U.N. hearings. You can accuse them of many things, but you can’t deny that they represent their government perfectly. Here is how they represented their government today: A U.S.-organized event on North Korea’s human rights briefly turned into chaos at the...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
April 27, 2015

In The Weekly Standard: North Korea’s war on women

I believe, having written this, that I’ve gotten out of my system everything I’ve ever wanted to write about Christine Ahn and Women Cross DMZ. For this year. I just hope Gloria Steinem doesn’t leave her feminism at home when she goes to Pyongyang. Millions of North Korean women need her support, more desperately than she’s willing to see. On the same topic, see also this op-ed, in The Washington Post, by Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Greg Scarlatoiu.

Categories Human Rights/Useful Idiocy
April 21, 2015

Obama Administration hints at sanctioning N. Korean human rights violators

A year after a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found the North Korean government responsible for crimes against humanity whose “gravity, scale and nature … reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” action at the U.N. has effectively stalled in the face of Chinese and Russian veto threats. As I have written before, Congress can impose effective sanctions on those responsible in ways that the U.N. can’t and the Obama Administration won’t. But now, the...

Categories Human Rights/Sanctions
February 23, 2015

Under NKSEA, transactions in N. Korean slave labor would be punishable by prison time

Yet again, a news story is reporting that North Korea is sending workers abroad to toil in conditions tantamount to slavery: When the North Korean carpenter was offered a job in Kuwait in 1996, he leapt at the chance. He was promised $120 a month, an unimaginable wage for most workers in his famine-stricken country, where most people are not allowed to travel abroad. But for Rim Il, the deal soured from the start: Under a moonlit night, the bus carrying him and...

Categories Human Trafficking
February 11, 2015

North Korea makes more homophobic slurs against Michael Kirby

Once again, North Korea is responding to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry’s exhaustively documented evidence of crimes against humanity … by making an issue of Chairman Kirby’s sexual orientation: The editorial also singled out the chair of the COI, Michael Kirby, and leveled homophobic abuse at the former judge, something it has done previously to discredit his work. “As far as the former chairman of the ‘Inquiry Commission’ Kirby is concerned, he is an old sexual maniac who earned an...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
February 10, 2015

Ten questions Gloria Steinem should ask the N. Koreans about women’s rights (but probably won’t dare to)

This week, I read that North Korea has granted permission for a group of women, including Gloria Steinem, and led by outspoken North Korean regime sympathizer Christine Ahn, to do a “peace march” across the DMZ. The group also intends to “hold international peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul,” where Ahn will probably repeat one of her favorite falsehoods, that “crippling sanctions against the government make it difficult for ordinary people to access the basics needed for survival.” It’s a statement that could...

Categories Anju Links/Human Rights/Useful Idiocy
January 18, 2015

Forgive Shin Dong Hyok the man, but not Shin Dong Hyok the activist

What had always puzzled me the most about Shin Dong Hyok’s account of growing up in and escaping from Camp 14 was how someone raised in such isolation from the rules of North Korean society could have had the resources and survival skills to infiltrate all the way from the Taedong River to the Chinese border, and then successfully cross it. How did he replace his prisoner clothing? How did he find money to bribe railroad police and border guards?...

Categories Activism/The Camps
January 9, 2015

Dear President Bush: You had eight years.

The George W. Bush center has released a call for “a new approach” to improve human rights in North Korea, complete with a video of the former President, looking a little older than the man we once knew. It’s hard to disagree with anything in the Bush Center’s call. For example, it calls for raising global awareness of the situation, citing polls showing that just half of Americans have heard of North Korea’s political prison camps. (This polling, of course, was done before Seth Rogen...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
December 20, 2014

We are all North Koreans now

As far as I know, I didn’t liberate a single North Korean during my four-year tour with the Army in South Korea, although I’ve argued their distant and forgotten cause ever since I came home. The crimes of Kim Jong Un were still distant just five weeks ago, when Professor Lee and I, writing in The New York Times, sounded a lonely warning about Kim’s efforts to censor his critics in the South with terror and violence, writing that “[c]aving...

Categories Censorship/Human Rights/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law