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October is parliamentary inspection season in South Korea, which means overtime for ministry officials as they scramble to provide answers to questions from National Assembly committees and members. An item in Yonhap (in Korean) reported on questions about Kaesong posed by members of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs, Trade and Unification Committee; the answers from [...]
Mickey Mouse sanctions: When we last checked, House International Relations Committee chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl) was fulminating over alleged sanctions busting by the perfidious bureaucrats over at WIPO. The UN agency after initially indicating that it would cooperate with US government investigators, rejected a request by the State Department to conduct an independent probe, [...]
Today’s Slave to the Blog is taken up with some recent stories on North Koreans getting out of the country. First, Chico Harlan at The Washington Post has a useful piece on the ongoing border crackdown. Last year, 2,706 North Koreans came to the South. During the first half of this year, there have been [...]
Earlier this month Human Rights Watch issued a policy brief concerning forced and child labor in North Korea based on the testimonies of 65 refugees interviewed in Thailand and South Korea. The brief cites eyewitness testimonies of coerced labor, extreme punishments, and child labor, including child labor organized by teachers. The testimonies are consistent with [...]
“Our country is well-organized. There are no riots, no strikes, no differences in opinion.” Kim Mun-sung, then Deputy Chair of the Committee for External Economic Cooperation. We are very protective of our North Korea comparisons. So we were not amused when we opened the New York Times this week to find a full page ad [...]
