A number of things have come into our inboxes on human rights in North Korea; a brief roundup.
Item 1. We blogged earlier on a meeting in Japan of a new International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea. The goal of the coalition is to seek the appointment of a UN Commission of Inquiry that would focus on four clusters of abuses in particular: the kwanliso prison camp system; the incarceration and abuse of Koreans forcibly repatriated from China; the abduction of foreign nationals; and recurrent food shortages (on which we first collaborated in Hunger and Human Rights). This approach was first outlined in another publication for the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea that picked up on the new humanitarian doctrine of “failure to protect.”
David Hawk—one of the brains behind the approach--reports to us that the conference was a success. Sponsored by the Tokyo office of Human Rights Watch, it gathered 40 NGOs including the “big four”: Amnesty International (represented in Tokyo by Jack Rendler), Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights. In addition, two highly-regarded international law NGOs are involved--the London-based Aegis Trust, and the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice--as well as the Commissioner from the ROK National Human Rights Commission who also heads the North Korea Committee of the Korean Bar Association. Two former prisoners from Yodok and one from Camp 18 participated in the Tokyo meeting as well.
The secretariat for this new NGO coalition (ICNK) will be in the office of the Seoul-based Open Radio, headed by Ha Tae-Keung (whom most of us know as Young Howard). A website is in the works.
Item 2. We just received some material from an organization called Human Rights without Frontiers International, a European-based organization which focuses its attention on the Community and Commission. A recent report on their website details EU policy toward North Korea in a useful way.
Item 3. We recently blogged on a project organized by Victor Cha and Dave Kang on unification, in which they make the point that it may be best to tread lightly with respect to transitional justice. Kathryn Sikkink (University of Minnesota), one of the most highly-respected political scientists working on human rights issues, offers a vigorous defense of putting autocrats on trial in a crisp op-ed in the New York Times. Based on her new book, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, Sikkink has some strong empirical research to back up her claims, which we always like to see. A taste from the NYT piece:
“Of 100 countries that underwent a [democratic] transition from 1980 to 2004 (the period for which extensive data is available), 48 pursued at least one human rights prosecution, and 33 of those pursued two or more. Countries that have prosecuted former officials exhibit lower levels of torture, summary execution, forced disappearances and political imprisonment. Although civil war heightens repression, prosecutions in the context of civil war do not make the situation worse, as critics claim.”
Sikkink also has evidence showing that such actions may have deterrent effects on autocrats in a given region.
Item 4. Coming up, we have been alerted to a book published last year on human rights by Ms. Jiyoung Song called Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives (Taylor and Francis, 2010). Our work is apparently mentioned as among "the existing academic literature on NK human rights that provides no conceptual, historical and theoretical richness... Ideologically biased... devoid of political context... and written from an advocacy perspective, putting pressure on the South Korean and US governments to adopt more hard-line policies toward the DRPK." Little does she know! In any case, it sounds like we have to read it and will report.
