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A second entry today on human rights events that may be of interest, this time in Seoul.
European countries—individually and collectively—have a perspective on the Korean peninsula that is not weighted down with the same strategic baggage as the Five Parties. As a result, humanitarian and human rights issues have figured prominently in European thinking, and European NGOs have accumulated a tremendous amount of on-the-ground experience.
We were thus intrigued by the launch in January of an EU-Korea Human Rights and Democratic Transition Dialogue Programme. The nucleus of the program is an alliance between the Hanns Seidel Foundation, associated with the CSU, and three NGOs based in Seoul: People for the Successful Corean Unification (PSCORE), North Korean Intellectual Solidarity(NKIS), and the North Korea Human Rights Database Center (NKDB). A distinctive feature of this line-up is representation and close connection with the North Korean refugee community in the South; PSCORE was formed with participation of young North Korean defectors, the NKIS is a group of North Korean intellectuals and the Database Center has sought to document human rights abuses in the North through extensive interviews with refugees.
The main objective of this program is to forge alliances between European and South Korean NGOs on human rights issues in Asia, with a particular focus on the North. Hann Seidel also hopes to draw on the European experience with respect to the integration of the transition economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Hanns Seidel has a number of projects on the ground in the North, including projects on sustainable forestry, biodiversity, organic agriculture and clean development. It will be interesting to see if the Foundation is running risks in taking an even more public stance on human rights issues.
The initiative is holding a conference in Seoul on March 20; details can be found here. Andrei Lankov, one of our favorite commenters on North Korea, is giving the keynote and the conference is open to the general public.
