There are many theories of the particularly bad turn North South relations have taken over the last two years, from the obvious (the missile and nuclear tests, the sinking of the Cheonan, the shelling of Yeonpyeong-do), to the “blame the victim” school (it’s LMB’s fault), to the more subtle (its all a complex game on Pyongyang’s part to extract benefits by raising the stakes; the North is now just waiting out the LMB government).
But the political cat-and-mouse with respect to South Korea’s human rights policy should not be discounted. Even if the current human rights bill before the National Assembly fails to pass, it is an ongoing reminder that South Korea has a significant “regime change” constituency. Moreover, LMB himself has once again spoken openly of unification coming sooner rather than later.
The US passed a North Korean Human Rights Act in 2004, and re-authorized it with some important changes in 2008. In 2005, a group of conservative South Korean lawmakers followed suit by introducing the South Korean counterpart; among others, Kim Moon-soo played a role in the effort, taking an expansive view of the human rights problem that included a “hole in the fence” strategy with respect to refugees.
The bill was shelved by the ruling Uri party as provocative and counterproductive to its efforts at engagement but was resubmitted in 2008. In late 2008, South Korea also joined in co-sponsoring a UN General Assembly resolution on human rights in North Korea. They had abstained in 2005—the first year such a resolution was passed—voted for it in 2006 in the wake of the nuclear tests, but then again abstained in 2007 in the context of the Roh-Kim summit.
Last February, the act passed the Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Unification Committee, but continues to face deep partisan disagreements and is holed up in the Legislation and Judiciary Committee. The Democratic Party has introduced its own competing North Korean Livelihoods and Human Rights Law, and offered to reconcile the two diametrically opposed bills. According to Chris Green, English editor of DailyNK, the GNP’s own reservations about the merits or significance of the legislation are ultimately responsible for its likely failure this month; he parses the current state of play in his useful Destination Pyongyang blog. If the GNP really wanted to force the issue, the National Assembly speaker could invoke his authority to put the bill to a plenary vote. The failure to do so suggests there may be some nervousness in the GNP ranks, perhaps including concerns about a possible North Korean response.
The GNP bill proposes the establishment of a North Korean human rights foundation that would compile information and provide assistance to human rights groups. The act would also establish a North Korean human rights archive, modeled on the German Salzgitter Center which documented East German rights abuses. The act would create an ambassador-at-large for North Korean human rights, as the US bill did.
But perhaps most provocatively, the bill requires that the provision of any humanitarian assistance meet international standards, a measure seen by the DP as an excuse to kill assistance to the North; an outline of MOUs defense of the bill can be found in Yonhap.
Hankyoreh outlines the DP’s criticism of the bill. The DP sees it as little more than pork for conservative lawmakers and domestic human rights groups. But the issue of humanitarian assistance is clearly a major stumbling block as well; the DP bill seeks to resume the engagement process and ease the provision of humanitarian assistance.
When the bill passed through a first committee hurdle last November, North Korea’s KCNA reminded its readers that “the ‘human rights’ issue does not exist under the dignified socialist system in the DPRK where the popular masses fully enjoy an independent life as a full-fledged master of the state and society with all kinds of political freedom and rights substantially guaranteed.” But recent commentary suggests that the real source of Pyongyang's concerns is LMB’s periodic comments on unification. When he visited the United States in 2008, he spoke plainly in response to a question that “the final, ultimate goal is unification under a liberal democratic system.” Several days ago, he said that unification could come more suddenly than anticipated, like "a thief in the middle of the night."
