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Category: Human Rights

December 4, 2013

Upcoming Events: “The Defector” Screenings, and EAHR’s online round table

I’D PREVIOUSLY POSTED ABOUT two new documentaries about how the real North Korea — the one behind the facade — is changing. One of these, The Defector, will be screened this week at two separate events in Washington. If you’re in the area, I hope you can make it. I OWE AN APOLOGY to the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea, which asked me to post about their online seminar on advocating for human rights in North Korea,...
Categories Activism/Books & Films
December 3, 2013

N. Korean security forces shooting each others’ officers, and Jang Song Thaek reportedly removed

Three weeks ago, the Joongang Ilbo reported that North Korea had publicly executed 80 people in seven provincial cities for such “crimes” as Bible possession and watching porn. Norkromancers took note at the time that the Daily NK, with its formidable network of informants inside North Korea, had abstained from corroborating the reports. A new Daily NK report, however, belatedly (sort of) corroborates them now, and the venue for the reported executions has a significance unto itself: A number of elite officials...
Categories Human Rights/Inside NK
November 12, 2013

Joongang Ilbo: N. Korea executes 80, mostly for thoughtcrimes

The Joongang Ilbo reports that North Korea has carried out a wave of executions in seven different provincial cities for such “crimes” such as watching South Korean soap operas, watching pornography, prostitution, and possession of a Bible. About 10 people were killed in each city, which included Wonsan in Kangwon Province, Chongjin in North Hamgyong Province, Sariwon in North Hwanghae Province and Pyongsong in South Pyongan. In Wonsan, eight people were tied to a stakes at a local stadium, had...
Categories Human Rights
October 25, 2013

Genius: HRNK’s Project ChocoPie

A Message from HRNK: Join Us for Project Choco Pie Dear Friends, Thank you for supporting HRNK’s mission to promote human rights in North Korea. For 65 years, North Korea has been theheart of darkness, under the three-generation rule of the Kim regime. In the 1990s, as millions starved, North Korea’s leadership spent billions on nukes and ballistic missiles. Despite the regime’s crackdown, small, but resilient markets have since developed, fending off another famine. The smuggled South Korean choco pie has become the symbol of North Korea’s...
Categories Activism
August 12, 2013

The Daily NK: Keeping the promises that the Sunshine Policy couldn’t

In a land of scarcity, North Korea’s scarcest commodity is truth, and it is truth that is transforming North Korea.  In the last ten years, North Korea’s death-grip on the flow of food, consumer goods, and information across its borders was fractured, and probably for good.  This change is enormously consequential to how we ought to approach North Korea.  Even as inter-governmental “Sunshine” and engagement failed decisively–and probably exacerbated North Korea’s brutality–market-based engagement and information flows have been profoundly transformative....
Categories Activism/Media Criticism
August 8, 2013

Rep. Albio Sires and Rabbi Abraham Cooper on Human Rights in North Korea

I’ll begin a gradual return from my hiatus by linking to this excellent op-ed by Rep. Albio Sires, Democrat from New Jersey, on the imperative of addressing North Korea’s human rights abuses. It’s a welcome sign that this isn’t a partisan issue. This op-ed, by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, follows it logically and compares North Korea’s abuses to some of those that occurred during the Holocaust.
Categories Human Rights/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
March 14, 2013

What will a U.N. inquiry on N. Korean human rights actually mean?

The U.N. Human Rights Council is set to approve an inquiry into human rights conditions in North Korea, conditions that a U.N. investigator says “may” be crimes against humanity: Marzuki Darusman, an investigator for the United Nations, is expected to present a report to the council urging the creation of an international commission of inquiry to follow up on the abuses recorded in the eight years that a United Nations official has monitored human rights in the North.  [N.Y. Times] So,...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
March 5, 2013

Park Geun Hye will back human rights probe of North Korea

You don’t need a Ph.D. to see that North Korea is gearing up to test Park Geun-Hye. The nice people at the quasi-official, Japan-based Chosun Sinbo reacted to Park’s inauguration speech, in which she called on North Korea to disarm, by saying they were “unable to hide our rage.”  Domestically, the North has launched another series of exhausting war exercises, with soldiers forced to live days on end in tunnels, or standing guard and catching frostbite outdoors. All of this is a...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
February 27, 2013

Would Dennis Rodman have played Sun City?

Visit Pyongyang – An idiom used to describe a desperate plea for media attention (see also Jump the Shark) by a washed-up celebrity or politician (see Jimmy Carter, Bill Richardson, Ric Flair) who, lacking the residual talent to attract such attention by any other means or device, visits the one place on Earth where any publicity-seeker whose name is vaguely recalled by persons over 40 can be assured of making global headlines without being arrested, indicted, or otherwise worthy of...
Categories Human Rights/Propaganda/Useful Idiocy
February 12, 2013

OFK in the WaPo

Many thanks to my friend Prof. Sung Yoon Lee for offering me the opportunity to co-write this with him, especially since he frankly did most of the writing this time.  It’s a pleasure to write with Prof. Lee.  He’s a terrific writer, and our views align so closely that there’s no need for painstaking negotiations over wording and content.  Really, I don’t know of anyone who (1) understands the pathology of North Korea better, and (2) can express it so...
Categories Human Rights/Sanctions/The Camps
February 9, 2013

U.N. may investigate N. Korean officials for crimes against humanity

I don’t know what’s gotten into the U.N. lately, but this would be a pretty big deal: North Korea’s leaders are likely to be the target of a U.N. investigation into their personal responsibility for rapes, torture, executions, arbitrary arrests and abductions, following an expert report published on Tuesday. The report by Marzuki Darusman, an Indonesian lawyer who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said North Korea’s “grave, systematic and widespread” human rights violations ought to...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
January 30, 2013

The Whole World Is Watching

Since I started this blog nearly ten years ago, I’ve had one primary objective — to do my small part to make it impossible for people with more influence than me to ignore North Korea’s crimes against humanity.  This week, for the first time, this quixotic campaign does not seem like such an exercise in futility.  Today, everyone on earth seems to be talking about Google maps and satellite imagery of concentration camps in North Korea, even posting fake “reviews”...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps
January 16, 2013

Ya Think? U.N. human rights chief suspects “crimes against humanity” in prison camp called “North Korea”

Nearly seven years after Jared Genser’s Failure to Protect and nearly nine years after David Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag, a senior U.N. official has gotten around to calling for “an in depth investigation” of what “may amount to crimes against humanity” in North Korea’s prison camps, and elsewhere in the larger prison sometimes called “The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea:” U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay called on Monday for an international investigation into what she said may be crimes against humanity in North Korea, including torture...
Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Human Rights/The Camps
December 4, 2012

An Idealist’s Apology

It’s not easy for me to admit this, but I saw a lot of myself in Mike Deri Smith’s story: After I finished the book, I couldn’t stop thinking about the prisoners Shin left behind in the gulag. I’d be standing at the meat counter at the supermarket choosing between the highest quality lamb, steak, pork, and chicken, and I would remember the rat meat that helped keep children alive in the camp, and the undigested corn kernels they pulled...
Categories Activism
July 2, 2012

No Pyongyang Spring

You may not believe that Kim Jong Un learned to drive at age three, but he has managed to perform one miracle — making North Koreans long for the libertine halcyon era of Kim Jong Il: The ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il’s sudden death in December of last year brought a tighter grip across the border.  Going even further, Kim Jong Un ordered a “guilt by association” system, which is a collective execution system which aims to terminate the entire...
Categories Human Rights/Inside NK/Refugees
June 18, 2012

Talking the Talk on Human Rights

After nearly four years of near-complete silence about North Korea’s human rights atrocities, Hillary Clinton is speaking truth to power: Clinton called on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons and related programs and put the welfare of its people first. “Only under these circumstances will North Korea be able to end its isolation from the international community and alleviate the suffering of its people,” she said. A coalition of 40 human rights organizations and activists in April submitted a...
Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights
June 6, 2012

New Report Details North Korea’s Political Apartheid System

Today at 2 p.m., the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will formally release its new report, “Marked for life: Songbun, North Korea’s Social Classification System.” Here is an extended excerpt: The songbun system in some ways resembles the apartheid race-based classification system of South Africa. Songbun subdivides the population of the country into 51 categories or ranks of trustworthiness and loyalty to the Kim family and North Korean state. These many categories are grouped into three broad castes:...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
June 1, 2012

State Department’s New Country Report on Human Rights in North Korea Disappoints

The main development I take from the report it is that the regime seems to be moving in the direction of decentralizing its political detention system, opening up more smaller (and less visible) detention centers and possibly closing down one of the largest camps. The same NGO reported the police began to dismantle the sixth facility, Bukchang (Camp 18) in South Pyongan Province, in 2006 and it was unclear if the camp remained in operation in 2011. The NGO is...
Categories Human Rights/The Camps