Please attend next Wednesday: House Foreign Affairs Committee to host event on U.N. Commission report

On March 5th at 3 p.m., the House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold an event with a panel discussion featuring leaders of prominent human rights NGOs, including Greg Scarlatoiu, Executive Director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, and Human Rights Watch. The Federation of Korean Associations in the U.S.A. will also participate — they’ve emerged as strong and highly effective advocates for the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act this year.

Also present will be Suzanne Scholte, head of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, who, by the way, is running for Congress in Virginia’s 11th District. Not all of the panelists have been finalized yet, but I’ll update this post as they are. (Yes, events hosted by Congress after often scheduled on very short notice. They’re driven by events and public interest.)

The discussion will focus on the findings of the COI report, and will also discuss policy responses to it, in light of China’s certain opposition to any action in the U.N. Security Council, including targeted sanctions or a referral to the International Criminal Court. (It’s good that the ChiComs timed the announcement of their obstructionism almost contemporaneously with the report’s release. That way, the focus immediately shifts toward other options designed to bypass China, minimize its influence, and shame its leaders.)

The event will take place in Room 2255 of the Rayburn House Office Building, which may be the most confusing building in the entire city.

See you there next week.

As long as we’re on the topic of the COI, and reactions to it:

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FORMER GUARD AHN MYONG CHOL, on the fate of children in the camps:

Speaking of an attack on children who were returning from the camp school, the former guard said: “There were three dogs and they killed five children. They killed three of the children right away. The two other children were barely breathing and the guards buried them alive.” [The Express]

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Elliot Engel, the (Democratic) Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has called for a referral of the U.N. Commission’s report to the International Criminal Court. Samantha Power was not available for comment, but John Kerry did call North Korea an “evil place” before changing the subject back to nukes. But the administration has not taken a position on whether it will push an ICC referral in the Security Council, or do anything else of significance:

“This is an evil, evil place. And it requires enormous focus by the world in order to hold it accountable. And I think every aspect of any law that can be applied should be applied,” he added.

The top American diplomat said he and Chinese leaders had in-depth talks on ways to deal with North Korea’s nuclear program. He traveled to Beijing two weeks ago for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Foreign Minister Wang Yi and other top officials.  “We had very serious discussions there about the options available to us. And we are continuing to press for action,” he said. He did not elaborate.

Rhetorically, Kerry has now caught up with where George W. Bush was a decade ago. Both men have an equal record of success in doing anything about it. The State Department still appears to be paralyzed in formulating a policy response to the COI’s report:

“We’re still in the processing of reviewing the recommendations,” Zeya said. “We would like to see the U.N. Human Rights Council, working with our like-minded partners, like South Korea, adopt a resolution to implement and follow up on this groundbreaking report.”

The career diplomat, meanwhile, urged China to alter its view on North Korean defectors and discontinue its practice of sending them back to their homeland. “We certainly believe that they should not be forcibly returned to North Korea. They deserve protection as refugees fleeing an absolutely deplorable regime,” she stressed.

They manage to call North Korea’s human rights record “deplorable,” as if we didn’t already know that. I have to think that if they were serious about this and had a coherent policy vision, they’d have consulted with Kirby in advance of the report’s release, and Treasury would already have drafted an executive order to block the assets of known human rights violators — Kim Jong Un, and the members of the National Defense Commission and the Organization and Guidance Bureau of the Korean Workers’ Party. Like this one, maybe, in effect against Iranian and Syrian officials. The President could sign it with much fanfare. Vision! Action! Global leadership!

Instead, the administration appears to be (a) caught off-guard; (b) passive, directionless, and visionless; (c) outsourcing our North Korea policy to China, as if China shared any of our interests in North Korea, or (d) stalling, in the hope that things will just blow over, and that this will become just another foreign policy issue they won’t have to think about. As it stands, they’re not even able to say whether they will push a Security Council referral to the International Criminal Court, which would at least force China to veto it.

The good news is that a serious response to Kim Jong Un’s crimes against humanity has won over a critical mass of classical liberals and Democrats. This is no longer a partisan issue, particularly given George W. Bush’s abdication of credibility in 2008. It’s now a battle between conscience and the absence of conscience — between a rump faction of a foreign policy establishment that hasn’t had an original idea since 1994 and whose record speaks for itself, and the rest of us. The rest of us are winning. We just aren’t winning fast enough.