Human Rights in North Korea : A Reinterpretation

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

To most outside of North Korea, and even those who espouse, as I do not, the 'Asian' approach to human rights as articulated be Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and others, North Korea has few human rights as defined by any of the diverse standards set up by the United Nations or most other institutions and under any international criteria.2) As the most secretive, closed, authoritarian, and autarkic society left in the world today, one could complete a paper on rights in the North in one, short declarative sentence: there are none.
This is appealing, and however generally accurate in a popular sense, it is not a guide for the peninsula perplexed. The deprivation of rights has been so well documented by a variety of international organizations and other studies that is seems superfluous to add on more paper to the many that already exist on this subject. Even if, as 'Asian rights' advocates proclaim, individual, political, and social rights are considered supplementary to more primary communal and economic rights (but not the unique "ideological" rights, as the North Koreans have written), North Korea has failed. The breakdown in its capacity to feed its people and the drop in the economic standards that were relatively impressive in the first two decades after the Korean War have become all too apparent. They cannot completely be traced to natural causes, as the North sometimes claims, but reflect more systemic issues that the North Korean leadership does not yet seem prepared to face.
There is no need here to cataloque the human rights abuses of North Korea, both those internal to the state and those external-the DPRK as a sponsor of state terriorism; they are well known and as extensively documented as any secretive society will allow. It may still be important, howeverm to point out the abuses. A variety of public and private organizations annually catalogue the lack of such rights. North Kore is rated by Freedom House as among the world's least free societies.