Search Results for: commission of inquiry

November 1, 2014

China arrests 11 more N. Korean refugees

Eleven North Korean defectors were arrested by Chinese police while seeking to cross the border with Myanmar, a source said Friday. Local police rounded up the defectors — 10 adults and a seven-year-old child — at around 3-4 a.m. on the day, shortly before they were to head towards the border in the southern region of Yunnan Province, according to the source. They were immediately put in custody in a police station there, added the source. A South Korean foreign...

Categories China & Korea/Refugees
October 31, 2014

Washington Post Editorial calls for International Criminal Court referral

The Editors of The Washington Post aren’t falling for North Korea’s so-called charm offensive, nor (thankfully) do they use that inapt cliché: [R]ecent maneuverings suggest that Pyongyang views the latest debate with alarm. North Korean diplomats have been attempting to head off any action that would lead to a referral to the ICC. The latest gambit was to invite Mr. Darusman to visit North Korea for the first time, a cynical gesture after the country refused to allow a visit by...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
October 28, 2014

On Europe, the U.N., luxury goods, and the ethical limits of engagement.

The latest rant from Professor Lee and me is published here, on CNN International, in the hope that it will catch the eyes of European audiences (and maybe even give Felix Abt a migraine). Mind you, I think the EU’s leadership of the U.N. response to the Commission of Inquiry report has been commendable, but Europe has to do a better job of enforcing U.N. sanctions, and curbing the actions of unethical profiteers who would sell Kim Jong Un cigarette-making...

Categories Europe/Luxury Goods
October 28, 2014

Charm offensive: N. Korea threatens to nuke U.S., hands out Halloween candy

As near as I can figure, Kim Jong Un’s stages of grief over his potential indictment for crimes against humanity have included denial, homophobia, mendacity, engagement, racism, and (again) terrorism, not necessarily in that order. The North Korean model differs from the Kübler-Ross model in its inclusion of several additional stages, and also, for its lack of an “acceptance” stage. In any case, North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated and opaque countries, seems to be taking the threat...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/The Camps
October 25, 2014

Charm offensive! N. Korean “diplomats” call Botswana’s UN Ambassador a “black bastard,” laugh at testimony of gulag survivors

Discussion about North Korea’s crimes against humanity is accelerating so quickly that it’s becoming difficult to keep up with it all. Last week, among other events, diplomats from Australia, Panama, and Botswana–which severed diplomatic relations with North Korea after the Commission of Inquiry published its report–held a Panel Discussion on human rights in the North. Not surprisingly, Botswana’s U.N. Ambassador is the latest target of North Korea’s racism, according to Vice News: At one point, members of the North Korean...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/Racism/WTF?
October 23, 2014

Incoherence of N. Korea’s human rights “engagement” betrays its insincerity

Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il could spend the duration of their reigns answering charges of atrocities with flat denials. That hasn’t worked since the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) published its landmark report in February, or during the scrutiny that has followed. Today, Kim Jong Un must deepen his overdraft of diplomatic capital to fend off an indictment before the International Criminal Court. Ambassador Robert King, U.S. Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, describes North Korea’s diplomats as “scrambling” and “fighting...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
October 22, 2014

Veto or not, a Security Council vote on N. Korean human rights is a victory

A draft U.N. General Assembly resolution, co-authored by EU and Japanese diplomats, may ask the Security Council “to refer North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to an international court” for his crimes against humanity, as documented extensively by a U.N. Commission of Inquiry. A draft leaked to the press on October 9th called for “effective targeted sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible for crimes against humanity,” possibly including Kim Jong Un himself. The draft also recommended “reporting the country’s...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
October 2, 2014

Park: Human rights are part of “our core agenda” with North Korea

I wonder whether, when, and how these words might actually translate into tangible policy: On Tuesday, Park made it clear that the North’s nuclear and human rights issues are “our core agenda in our policy toward North Korea. “We should not be passive in these issues out of fear of North Korea’s backlash,” Park said in a Cabinet meeting, a comment that marked a clear departure from her liberal predecessors who rarely spoke about the human rights issue as they...

Categories Human Rights/North-South
September 26, 2014

U.N. should fund its aid programs from Kim Jong Un’s Swiss accounts.

The Wall Street Journal updates us on the dire financial state of the U.N. World Food Program’s operations in North Korea. The United Nations aid program for malnourished North Koreans may close after raising only a fraction of the money it needs to operate in the country, a senior U.N. official said in a call for donations. “We may need to scale down or think about closing altogether,” Dierk Stegen, the Pyongyang-based North Korea head for the U.N. World Food...

Categories Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
September 24, 2014

Kerry to North Korea: “[C]lose those camps … shut this evil system down.”

It’s no secret to readers of this site that I’ve never been an admirer of John Kerry. His tenure has been a rolling catastrophe for our national security, in a way that even a rank amateur could have predicted years ago. It’s often difficult to see that he has a North Korea policy at all. Not so long ago, I criticized Kerry for showing no sign of pressing for action on the U.N. Commission of Inquiry report on human rights in North Korea. But...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
September 23, 2014

North Korean Gulag survivors call on Switzerland to freeze Kim Jong Un’s slush funds (Alternate title: Cursed are the Cheesemakers).

Switzerland has always been there for North Korea. When North Koreans were starving to death in heaps, Switzerland was there to receive Kim Jong Il’s personal shopper and sell him millions of dollars’ worth of its finest timepieces. When North Korea needed creative new ways to make money – literally! – Switzerland sold it the very same intaglio presses and optically variable ink our Bureau of Engraving and Printing uses to make money. When Kim Jong Un needed a place...

Categories Activism/Anju Links/Europe/Money Laundering/Refugees/Sanctions
September 18, 2014

What Bob King should have said about travel to North Korea.

Ambassador Robert King, whose title is Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, has written to The Washington Post in response to Anna Fifield’s reporting on North Korea’s efforts to market itself as a tourist destination (which may be more accurately described as the efforts of foreign collaborators to sell North Korea as a fine place to go slumming). King wishes that Fifield had given more emphasis to what should be obvious to anyone with good sense — that “[t]ravel to...

Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Foreigners in N. Korea
September 17, 2014

Must Read: Bruce Klingner on North Korea sanctions

Writing at the blog of the (cough, cough) Korea Economic Institute, Klingner, a former CIA analyst and a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, hammers home the weakness of our North Korea sanctions and their enforcement. While still at the State Department, Campbell realized that “Burma had much more in the way of sanctions” than North Korea and correctly, if belatedly, concluded that “Clearly we have not been successful at putting substantial pressure on North Korea [and] it would be possible for us...

Categories Sanctions
September 3, 2014

What if the capitalist North Korea is just as bad as the communist North Korea?

There are many reasons why the Sunshine Policy failed, most of them rooted in the character of the men who rule in Pyongyang, and in the character of the men in Seoul who conceived and executed it. And in that conception, the flaw that was obvious to some of us from the very beginning was that Sunshine — and its surviving derivatives — invested its monotheistic faith in economic reform, yet in practice (and to a large extent, in theory,...

Categories Capitalism/Engagement/NK Economics/Sunshine
August 27, 2014

To address hunger in North Korea, the World Food Program must first tell the truth.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the World Food Program may soon suspend operations in North Korea due to a lack of funding. The program’s internal reports claim that as of late 2013, it was feeding just 1.45 million North Koreans, compared to 2.4 million intended recipients, mostly pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children. Most of what is distributed now consists of materiel like high-energy biscuits, which (thankfully) are not easily digested by healthy people and thus not easily diverted....

Categories Famine & Food Aid
August 25, 2014

Is Obama’s North Korea policy at a tipping point?

Following of Congress’s resounding, bipartisan vote of no confidence in the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy last month, Secretary of State John Kerry has been traveling around the Pacific. In Australia, while meeting with that country’s Foreign Minister and Defense Minister, he traversed his gargantuan mandible toward Pyongyang and threatened to tighten sanctions “if it ‘chooses the path of confrontation.” If? If? “The United States — I want to make this clear — is absolutely prepared to improve relations with...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
August 20, 2014

John Kerry was right about North Korea (and so was John Bolton)

More than six months after a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found Kim Jong Un responsible for crimes against humanity, our State Department has offered no credible or coherent policy response to that report. At least it hadn’t until last week, when our Secretary of State, John Kerry — no doubt, after much agonizing deliberation — finally authorized the deployment of precision-guided tactical ballistic words: “But make no mistake, we are also speaking out about the horrific human rights situation,” Kerry...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/Media Criticism
August 13, 2014

First as tragedy, then as farce

The story I linked Monday about Michael Kirby’s comments spurring the U.N. to action in North Korea eventually grew into two posts, because in the same story, Kirby also warned against trivializing what’s happening in North Korea. The Commission of Inquiry, which reported to the UN in March, detailed horrific abuses of human rights in North Korea, including starving political prisoners reduced to eating grass and rodents in secret gulags, schoolchildren made to watch firing squad executions, and women forced...

Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Books & Films/Censorship