Search Results for: commission of inquiry

August 12, 2014

Senate intel bill would require report on N. Korean gulags

Yonhap points me to S.2741, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015, introduced by Committee Chair Diane Feinstein the day before Congress went into summer recess, and a few days after the House passed H.R. 1771, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act. Section 316 of S.2741 would require the CIA to report to the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees on North Korea’s political prison camps: SEC. 316. REPORT ON POLITICAL PRISON CAMPS IN NORTH KOREA. (a) In General.–The...

Categories U.S. Law
August 11, 2014

A campaign is more than just a vote

Justice Michael Kirby, the head of U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) for Human Rights in North Korea, has struggled to get the attention of the U.N. Security Council since February of this year, when the COI released its report finding widespread and horrific crimes against humanity. This leaves Kirby wondering whether hundreds of European lives matter more to the U.N. than hundreds of thousands of North Korean lives. Michael Kirby has called on the United Nations to show the same...

Categories "United" Nations
August 9, 2014

Must hear: Kurt Achin’s podcast from Hack North Korea

I think Thor Halvorssen is my new idol. Most people believe that the North Korean government — and emphasis on government — is an issue that should be addressed by governments, or by a collection of governments. Well, we believe in helping people. We believe in peer-to-peer networks. We are not interested in, you know, running to the U.N., which has been oh-so-extraordinary at stopping genocides from occurring — that’s dripping in sarcasm. We don’t believe the United Nations is...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
July 30, 2014

Congress marks 20th anniversary of Agreed Framework I, asks how that’s working out

The House Asia-Pacific Subcommittee commemorated the 20th anniversary of Agreed Framework I by calling Ambassadors Glyn Davies and Bob King over for a hearing this afternoon, and it was a tough day for Team Foggy Bottom. If you want to see how congressional oversight should work – if you want to see a well-informed, well-prepared legislator completely, verifiably, and irreversibly dismantle 20 years of bad policy – then watch Subcommittee Chairman Steve Chabot’s opening statement. Chabot made great use of...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
July 29, 2014

Untrained eyes fail to perceive John Kerry’s North Korea “progress”

~   1   ~ BRUCE KLINGNER OF THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION asks, “You call this progress, Secretary Kerry?” Kerry cites his meetings with China regarding North Korea, yet Beijing continues to resist U.S. entreaties to increase pressure on Pyongyang by more fully implementing UN resolution sanctions. In the meantime, Pyongyang continues to refine and augment its nuclear arsenal while Washington remains reluctant to impose the same unilateral US sanctions that it has already imposed on Iran, Burma, and Syria. Nor...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
July 28, 2014

Roberta Cohen in the WaPo, on preventing a massacre in N. Korea’s gulag

Writing in The Washington Post, Roberta Cohen, Co-Chair of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, writes about how to prevent the execution of “standing orders at North Korea’s political prison camps (the kwanliso) to kill all prisoners in the event of armed conflict or revolution.” It was Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder, who gave the kill-all order. His son Kim Jong-il reaffirmed it. Ahn Myong-chol, a former guard, testified before the U.N. commission that, in the event of upheaval,...

Categories The Camps
July 28, 2014

Is the U.S. ready to take N. Korea’s crimes against humanity to the Security Council?

On balance, probably not, but hey, it’s an election year, which may or may not explain why it’s making noise like it might: The United States, France and Australia called for the United Nations Security Council to deal with North Korea’s human rights violations, a news report said Saturday. It isn’t clear why this push is happening nearly six months after the release of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) report; after all, the testimony before the COI was widely covered in...

Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Human Rights
July 22, 2014

Test something louder, Dear Leader. John Kerry still can’t hear you.

With the world erupting in the greatest cascade of escalating conflicts since 1975 and President Obama’s approval rating on foreign policy at negative 21.2% – 11% lower than his overall (dis)approval rating — John Kerry eked out some time over the weekend to tempt fate with a dubious boast: I just came back from China, where we are engaged with the Chinese in dealing with North Korea. And you will notice, since the visit last year, North Korea has been...

Categories Diplomacy/Missiles/NK Military
July 15, 2014

You’d be surprised how much tougher our Zimbabwe and Belarus sanctions are than our North Korea sanctions.

The Treasury Department has just tightened its sanctions regulations on … Zimbabwe, more than doubling the number of Zimbabwean entities on Treasury’s List of Specially Designated Nationals (called the SDN List) from 77 to 161, including “President” Robert Mugabe, his wife, and his son. The sanctions are largely directed at the Mugabe regime’s human rights violations, corruption, and subversion of the democratic process. Here, from Treasury’s Federal Register notice, is a summary of what those sanctions do: Section 1(a) of...

Categories Human Rights/Sanctions
July 8, 2014

Refugees’ lives may depend on interpretations of Sino-Korean consular agreement

Human rights advocates have long contended that China’s repatriation of North Korean refugees violates international law, including obligations China undertook voluntarily in the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1969 Protocol. A U.N. Commission of Inquiry recently added its weight to that contention and strongly criticized China’s disregard of that Convention. [Suzanne Scholte and Rep. Park Sun-young protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Seoul, 2012] Some rights advocates have hoped that the COI’s report would force China to alter its refugee-deportation policy,...

Categories China & Korea/Refugees
June 30, 2014

N. Korea Perestroika Watch: 2 U.S. tourists to face “trial” for petty heresies

One of the core arguments of the Sunshine Policy and its “engagement”-based derivative theories is that more people-to-people contact between Americans and North Koreas will reduce tensions, stimulate economic and political reforms, and eventually, improve inter-governmental relations.* The last two decades have been unkind to this theory, but today, North Korea made an announcement suggesting that its opposite may be closer to the truth. SEOUL—North Korea said Monday it will charge two Americans in its custody with unspecified crimes, a move that may signal...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
June 16, 2014

Open Sources, June 16, 2014

~   1   ~ Congressional Hearing, June 18th: “Human Rights Abuses and Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea.” The briefer will be Ambassador Lee Jung-Hoon, South Korea’s Ambassador for Human Rights. I’m rather interested in Lee’s answers, because I see no evidence that either the U.S. or South Korea intends to offer a credible policy response to the Commission of Inquiry’s report. If you wonder just how much the South Korean government is embracing and acting on the COI’s...

Categories Anju Links
June 3, 2014

Open Sources, June 3, 2014

~   1   ~ MUST-READ: NK NEWS has obtained and analyzed recent satellite images of the site of that apartment collapse in Pyongyang. It’s too bad that there aren’t any images of the site from early May, so that they could draw some firmer conclusions, but it’s clear that either the regime (a) covered up the collapse for days (if not weeks) to protect it from unfavorable comparisons to the Sewol Ferry disaster, (b) hauled the debris away with no consideration of...

Categories Anju Links
May 7, 2014

Really? North Korea called President Obama “a wicked black monkey”? (Update: It’s worse than that; Update 2, now with full translation)

Oh, yes they did: Park made waste water-like reckless remarks slandering the DPRK’s line on simultaneously developing two fronts after inviting her American master reminiscent of a wicked black monkey to visit south Korea on April 25…. The people are unanimous in deploring the fact that there is no remedy for curing Park’s mental disease as she has gone so mad with hurling mud at the nuclear deterrence of justice which the fellow countrymen in the north have had access...

Categories AP Watch/Diplomacy/Racism/WTF?
April 25, 2014

Breaking! N. Korean gulag prisoners celebrate liberation by Samantha Power’s hashtag

The Talmud scholars have long written that it isn’t given to any generation of human beings to correct every wrong and every injustice. But neither are we excused from our obligation to try. And that is the challenge as an international community we face this week. It isn’t given to any generation, or members of the Security Council or the great officers of the world, to right every wrong. But surely we are not excused from our obligation to make...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
April 8, 2014

HRNK to host address by Michael Kirby, other events next week

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will host a series of events next week. From HRNK’s site: – Human Rights in North Korea: An Address by Michael Kirby. On April 14, the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at Brookings and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) will host an address by Michael Kirby, chair of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea (COI), to present its findings and recommendations. Following...

Categories Human Rights