Failure to Protect

orth%20Korea%20Report.pdf”>Failure to Protect (pdf file) – on the grounds that the North Korean regime has manifestly failed in its duty to protect its citizens. It’s a lengthy and well-documented indictment of Kim Jong Il’s gross human rights violations. Here’s the foreword:

Although in recent weeks the international focus has been on North Korea’s nuclear weapons test, the situation in that country is also one of the most egregious human rights and humanitarian disasters in the world today. Yet sadly, because North Korea is also one of the most closed societies on Earth, information about the situation there has only trickled out over time.

With the unanimous adoption by the UN Security Council of the doctrine that each state has a “responsibility to protect” its own citizens from the most egregious of human rights abuses, a new instrument for international diplomacy has emerged. While states retain sovereignty to control their own territory, if they fail to protect their own citizens from severe human rights abuses, the international community now has an obligation to intervene through regional bodies and the United Nations, up to and including the Security Council.

In this context, we commissioned the global law firm DLA Piper LLP to work with the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea in preparing an objective and definitive report on the failure of the North Korean government to exercise its responsibility to protect its own people.

The evidence and analysis contained in this report is deeply disturbing. Indeed, it is clear that Kim Jong Il and the North Korean government are actively committing crimes against humanity. North Korea allowed as many as one million, and possibly many more, of its own people to die during the famine in the 1990s. Hunger and starvation remain a persistent problem, with over 37 percent of children in North Korea chronically malnourished. Furthermore, North Korea imprisons upwards of 200,000 people in its modern-day gulag, and it is estimated more than 400,000 have died in that system over 30 years.

It is on this basis that we strongly urge the UN Security Council to take up the situation of North Korea. Protecting the people of North Korea requires nothing less.

From the authors:

President Havel, Prime Minister Bondevik, and Professor Wiesel commissioned this report because they believe that, for far too long, the security threat posed by North Korea has relegated the human rights concerns in the country to a second-class status. North Korea’s nuclear weapons test, conducted on October 9, 2006, demonstrated the fallacy of the argument that not antagonizing its government on human rights concerns would promote successful engagement on security issues. Our clients believe, in the wake of that test, the human rights and humanitarian crisis in North Korea deserves to be treated on a parallel track with the security threat and should no longer be suppressed from international discussions.

In other words, the Sunshine Policy has been shown, repeatedly, to be worse than useless. It’s time to get tough.

(Via One Free Korea, with the comment, “One day, this will be Prosecution Exhibit Number 1 in Kim Jong Il’s trial”)