North Korea's Human Rights Insecurity: State Image Management in the Post‐UN COI Era

Abstract

The 2014 report of the United Nations

Thinking about engaging North Korea: A study on the framing of the U.S. human rights public discourse in the Washington Post and New York Times between 2001 and 2017

“…North Korea's engagement with the international community on human rights has been limited to the submission of communiques and reports prior to the release of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic Republic of Korea's report in 2014 (European Parliament, ; Ferenczy, ; Office of the High Commission on Human Rights [OHCHR], ; Son, ; Song, ). It was only after the report that the government opened a two‐track approach to engagement, one with the UN and the other with the European Union.…”

“…At the UN, high‐level government officials openly discussed human rights and engaged in dialogue. For example, North Korea's foreign minister visited the UN General Assembly for the first time in 15 years, whereas the ambassador of permanent mission to the UN publicly discussed the UN Commission of Inquiries recommendation that North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (Son, ). It also accepted the recommendations of the 2009 Universal Periodic Review, submitted alternative reports and published books on human rights in its country, and ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.…”

“…Particularists argue that the rights‐based discourse of the international community is western centric; dispute the importance afforded to and applicability of all types of rights and give priority to the right to development (socioeconomic rights); and adopt a cultural relativist position on the implementation of rights in either a region or a country. North Korea posits that human rights are conditional and shaped by national context and the domestic reality on the ground; collective rights are above individual rights; and welfare and subsistence rights (socioeconomic rights) have special importance (Son, , p. 142). The government discourse does not outright reject the claim that there is a universal rights discourse.…”

Watching North Korea from the sky: Remote sensing and documenting human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

“…Despite North Korea's continued rebuffing of accusations surrounding its human rights record, the findings of a United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK (UN COI) published in 2014 concluded that widespread and systematic human rights abuses are taking place in North Korea, sufficient to claim that crimes against humanity have been committed, "pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the state" (Questions and Answers on the Report of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, 2014). The evidence and recommendations presented prompted an unusually robust response from North Korea, along with an unprecedented level of sudden, if largely token, engagement with the United Nations' human rights review mechanism, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) (Son, 2018). However, aside from such engagement and sparse evidence of minor progress on the rights of persons with disabilities (World Report 2018, 2017, it does not appear that the state institutions and policies responsible for continuing human rights violations have changed their practices significantly in response to the findings and recommendations of the UN COI (Inquiry into Human Rights Violations in North Korea 2014Korea -2020Korea /21, 2021.…”