A decade ago, I chaired a United Nations commission of inquiry that delivered a major report on the human rights situation in North Korea. Our findings were transmitted to the highest levels of the U.N. and to governments around the world. Yet, the shocking abuses we documented — executions, enslavement, forced labor, torture, forced abortions, and rape and other sexual violence, among other atrocities — have continued.
In fact, new reports, such as one recently by Human Rights Watch, suggest that such abuses are growing worse even as North Korea has steadily increased its proliferation of nuclear warheads and missiles. The U.N. system has largely failed to address the crisis. While other problems and conflicts have dominated the world’s attention, the situation in North Korea is too serious to ignore.
On March 17, 2014, after nearly a year of investigatory hearings, interviews, and evidence collection, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea presented a 372-page report to the U.N. Human Rights Council (summary and detailed reports available here). It documented decades of systematic and widespread rights violations by North Korea’s government. We concluded that many of the abuses met the high legal threshold required for proof of “crimes against humanity.”
The U.N. General Assembly voted a few months later to transmit our full report, formally, to the U.N. Security Council. In December 2014, that body held its first debate on North Korea’s human rights record, and on whether to refer the situation there to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as we had recommended. But since Russia and China would likely veto the recommendation, no action was taken. Still, the U.N. Human Rights Council set up an office in Seoul to continue to gather evidence of abuses.
What action has been taken since? Not much. Amid threatened vetoes by Russia and China, failed diplomatic overtures by the Trump administration, the Covid pandemic, and other global crises, North Korean human rights largely fell off the radar. Competing issues captured world attention and still do.
‘Shoot-on-Sight’ Orders
North Korea, however, remains in crisis. As the March report from Human Rights Watch outlined, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has since 2020 almost entirely sealed the country’s northern border with China and Russia to transit and trade. It has been fortified with hundreds of miles of new fences, enforced with “shoot-on-sight” orders.
At the same time, the authorities have tightened control over every aspect of society, imposed overbroad and excessive restrictions on freedom of movement, restricted economic activity and communication, and instituted new ideological controls and harsher punishments. Since at least 2021, reports have emerged of starvation and serious shortages of food and essential goods.
It now appears that Kim Jong Un has used the last 10 years to reestablish a system of centralized economic control in North Korea, similar to what existed during the Cold War. Citizens are terrorized into obedience and remain completely dependent upon the state to survive. Kim has turned the horrendous situation that existed when he took power — a closed society without basic rights, suffering from chronic deprivations — into a fully totalitarian dystopia, similar to the society ruled by his grandfather, Kim Il Song in the 1950s to 1970s.
Kim Jong Un has also escalated North Korea’s hostility and defiance toward the U.N. system and most of its member States, launching an increasing number of long-range missiles and conducting nuclear detonations in 2013, 2016, and 2017, the last of which may have been a thermonuclear fusion device, a technology allowing smaller warheads. Its reactors are reportedly producing both uranium and plutonium. North Korea now possesses credible nuclear strike capacities threatening Japan, South Korea, China, and even possibly the United States.
In addition, North Korea’s weapons program itself has involved massive human rights abuses, as it prioritizes spending on nuclear arms over food and other essentials and uses forced labor in the military and the defense industries. In turn, it sells deadly weapons to other abusive regimes for revenue production. On a broader level, massive rights violations and prioritization of the regime’s survival are precisely what enabled it to develop nuclear weapons in the first place. Decades of failures to address those abuses have encouraged North Korea to entrench its totalitarian rule.
Include Human Rights in Future Negotiations
In the end, North Korea’s human rights crisis is just as inescapable as its nuclear threats. This is another reason why it is vital that North Korea’s human rights issues return to their rightful place among the top items on the U.N. Security Council’s agenda. Human rights must be included in any future negotiations with Pyongyang. Doing so will be beneficial for practical reasons related to verification and transparency — many experts now acknowledge that rights issues are central for successful negotiations, since any sustained diplomatic progress or durable verification of agreements will require North Korea to restore access to U.N. inspectors and improve real cooperation with the U.N. system. That means the kind of transparency that is currently foreclosed by such a repressive regime. Monitoring will also inevitably entail recognizing the weapons systems’ connections with rights abuses.
The world should not ignore these interconnections any longer. The threats that Kim Jong Un poses to the world are directly connected to the threats he poses to the people of North Korea. His nuclear threats are human rights threats. Concerned governments should support reengagement with Kim Jong Un to address the escalating security threats and the country’s humanitarian and human rights situation.
The U.N. Human Rights Council in April requested that the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights prepare a follow-up to the Commission of Inquiry report, to facilitate better understanding of new developments since 2014. This is a positive step. But the threat posed by North Korea now goes beyond the mandate of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The U.N. Security Council needs to re-engage with North Korea. Members should request the U.N. Secretary General and relevant U.N. agencies to provide further briefings on the humanitarian crisis and the ongoing evidence of links between rights abuses and North Korea’s weapons program.
Yet the council itself is now deadlocked on all North Korea matters, including with respect to weapons proliferation and international peace and security, unable to reach consensus even in response to recent missile launches.
It’s up to the U.N. General Assembly to insist on regular reporting on the linkages between North Korea’s weapons development, its threat to international peace and security, and the human rights situation. A strong General Assembly resolution is a first step.
Recently, at the 2024 International Dialogue on North Korean Human Rights in Washington D.C., experts gathered to discuss the urgent need for accountability 10 years after the Commission of Inquiry report. After the Second World War, the world promised never again to look away from the gravest human rights abuses. We should be clear-sighted and accept that we cannot divorce international peace and security in North Korea from the egregious abuse of the human rights of its people. Continuing to allow such an ill-governed, abusive, and unstable state to threaten our fragile planet may be the greatest human rights abuse of all.