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Democracy promotion and human rights diplomacy are often assumed to be American conceits, but we are not alone. Among recently-created democracy efforts, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy deserves mention. Founded in 2003, the Foundation is engaged in a full spectrum of activities, from the practical to the academic (for example, they publish the Taiwan Journal of [...]
In 2012, the Human Rights Foundation created a new prize with a doubly-great title: the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent. Why doubly great? Because we always admired Havel and because the idea of “creative dissent” captures so well the difficult, David vs. Goliath nature of resistance to tyrannical regimes. Asia was strongly represented in [...]
We like to spotlight existing and new organizations doing work on North Korea, and New Focus International brought this start-up to our attention: the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea. According to its founder Mike Glendinning, the organization began via social media and has the ambition to work with refugees to highlight issues [...]
There is a pattern of North Korea exploiting the detention of American citizens—often as a result of their own naïveté, we should add—to secure visits from high-ranking special envoys. It is much less clear what benefits North Korea has managed to reap from this ritual. The visit of Google’s Erik Schmidt is an example: the [...]
We pass along the following information from our friends at the North Korea Freedom Coalition. Have a look at the upcoming events and attend if you are able. ____ Dear Friends: While the world watches for a possible nuclear missile test by North Korea in the coming days and the Kim Jong Eun regime increases [...]
Radio Times guest host, Tracey Matisak, interviews Marcus Noland about what life is like in North Korea. While life in Pyongyang may be relatively more transparent to the outside world, very little is known about life for the rest of the population. Noland draws on survey data used as the basis for the book, Witness to Transformation: [...]
What are European legislators reading on the North Korean human rights situation? We were recently alerted to a EU Parliamentary briefing (in .pdf) from last September that provides a useful overview in its own right. The document, prepared by Anete Bandone in the Directorate-General for External Policies, takes an unsparing look at the human rights [...]
One reason we were motivated to write Witness to Transformation is to add in our small way to the collective memory. But nothing is more compelling than letting the refugees speak for themselves. In the attached TED talk, Hyeonseo Lee tells her story in a simple, direct and moving way: the indoctrination as a child, [...]
By consensus, the Human Rights Council of the United Nations has established a commission of inquiry into the human rights situation in North Korea (the resolution and background documents can be found here). With respect to the substance of the investigation, the agenda was set by the Special Rapporteur’s report, which we looked at in [...]
The Chosun Ilbo recently published a troubling story about the thousands of children of North Korean refugee women currently living without their mothers in China. The story was inspired by a report from the Korean National Human Rights Commission that involved a survey of 100 children living in china with North Korean mothers. The most [...]
