Search Results for: commission of inquiry

September 22, 2015

Kirby denounces Pyongyang’s abductions as “barbarous,” “reunion” lotteries as “extremely cruel”

I wish I could claim authorship of the term “North Korean exceptionalism,” of the civilized world’s tendency to bow to North Korea’s obnoxious cruelty, to the point of excusing it from every obligation of law, treaty, or humanity. I understand the reasoning behind North Korean exceptionalism: North Korea is a special case. Its terrible history of war/occupation/poverty/whatever makes it a special challenge to draw it out of its shell. Therefore, we must take a gradualist approach that compromises our standards...

Categories Abductions
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 27, 2015

House, Senate will both hold hearings on North Korea policy this week* (updated)

If you ask senior Obama Administration officials about the policy of “strategic patience” with North Korea today, they will bristle and recast it as something else, but this wasn’t the case in 2010, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained her policy in a visit to Seoul: “What we’re focused on is changing North Korean behavior,” one senior U.S. official said. “We are not focused on getting back to the table.” “We recognize that diplomacy, some form of diplomacy with North Korea, is inevitable...

Categories U.S. Politics/Washington Views
July 17, 2015

U.N. asks China why it sent 29 refugees, including a 1 year-old baby, to North Korea

The U.N. has requested Beijing for an explanation of its decision to repatriate 29 North Korean defectors last August, and of their current status in North Korea. [….] The U.N. Commission of Inquiry is particularly concerned about the status of human-trafficking victims and illegal immigrants in China, and the persecution or torture, as well as the long detentions that await returnees in North Korea, South Korean outlet No Cut News reported. North Korean women also are vulnerable to forced abortions...

Categories China/Refugees
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 6, 2015

EU blocking of Korea National Insurance Corp. hints at key shift in N. Korea sanctions enforcement

The European Union’s administrative body, the European Commission or EC, has added seven additional designations to its regulation on “restrictive measures” against North Korea. The new designees include the Korea National Insurance Corporation, or KNIC, and six of its officials. There are several good reasons why the EC could have designated KNIC, but didn’t (the reason it did use is more interesting, but we’ll get to that later). First, KNIC has been linked to Pyongyang’s luxury goods imports, which have been banned since...

Categories Europe/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
June 8, 2015

Guerrilla Engagement: A strategy for regime replacement and reconstruction in North Korea

~ 1 ~ One day, either this President or the next one will awaken to the realization that the regime in Pyongyang is collapsing, and that he has just inherited the costliest, messiest, and riskiest nation-building project since the Marshall Plan. The collapse of North Korea will present South Korea – and by extension, its principal treaty ally, the United States – with a nation-building challenge unlike any in recent history. After all, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria all had some...

Categories Capitalism/Reconstruction/Regime Change/Resistance/Subversion
June 8, 2015

Here comes the crazy train!

Jason Unruhe, who looks like an overripe ripe kiwi fruit decorated with a Mister Potato Head set, goes by the Twitter handle “Maoist Rebel News” and calls himself the “No. 1 Marxist on YouTube,” and yes, that is like being the “No. 1” sommelier under the 395 overpass. It’s my privilege to report that Mr. Unruhe is upset with me, after he provoked a Twitter fracas by raging against “imperialist” sanctions against North Korea. At this point, I explained to...

Categories Useful Idiocy
May 25, 2015

Women Cross DMZ: A Q&A, and closing thoughts (updated)

In the end, nothing illustrated the absurdity of Women Cross DMZ, the march to end the Korean War, better than the fact that it began with homages to Kim Il-Sung, the man who started the Korean War. Its emotional apex was reduced to a bus ride and a wait in an immigration line. It ended with organizer Christine Ahn ducking reporters to avoid questions about her reported comments praising Kim Il Sung (here’s the original Korean article from Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmun). It was left to Gloria Steinem and...

Categories Useful Idiocy
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 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
April 20, 2015

RFA: North Korea tells overseas workers to attack journalists

Ever since the U.N. Commission of Inquiry issued its report last year, North Korea has been particularly sensitive to accusations of human rights violations. It shouldn’t surprise us that this sensitivity is especially keen when the scrutiny threatens to cut off a growing source of hard currency — its export of what amounts to slave labor to places like Russia, Malaysia, and Qatar. Press reports on the working conditions of these workers, and the regime’s spotty history of paying their (paltry) wages, have embarrassed the regime, embarrassed companies...

Categories Human Trafficking/Terrorism (NK)
April 15, 2015

Why does North Korea still need food aid? (Updated)

The UN aid agencies working in North Korea — the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Population Fund, UNICEF, the World Food Program, and WHO (writing collectively as Relief Web) — have published a new report. I draw three main conclusions from it. First, despite some reports of improved food production, the humanitarian situation is still bad. Second, aid agencies still aren’t being forthcoming about the most important reasons for that. Third, various UN entities are working at cross purposes, and don’t...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
April 10, 2015

Help! Help! I’m being repressed! (Part 2)

Christine Ahn’s pursuit of global fame is having unintended consequences, mostly for Gloria Steinem. At Hot Air, Noah Rothman writes, “If women’s rights are also human rights, then North Korea is no friend to either.” He accuses Ahn and Steinem (and other “progressives”) of turning “a blind eye toward real abuses in order to support the cause of totalitarian statism.” In The Daily Beast, Lizzie Crocker writes that Ahn “has long been uncritical of North Korea, a country that has some committed...

Categories Useful Idiocy
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
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 2, 2015

President blocks all assets of the N. Korean gov’t, ruling party … maybe.

A new executive order signed by President Obama and published at around 2:00 today is either a game-changer in his North Korea policy or a wet paper tiger. On its face, the Executive Order is tough, sweeping, and potentially lethal: Section 1. (a) All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred,...

Categories Anju Links
November 18, 2014

Today’s General Assembly vote is about the people of North Korea, and the relevance of the U.N. itself (Update: UNGA approves, 111-19-55)

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.  – Voltaire It now seems that the U.N. General Assembly’s vote on a North Korea human rights resolution is to take place this very day. Because of Justice Kirby’s report — and because of what so many survivors have told us, at the risk of their lives — no one can ever again say, “I did not know.” Unlike the bystanders of previous generations, we are free to speak, and to act. The draft resolution...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights