A report recently emerged that the government is considering a plan to essentially scrap the establishment of the National Center for North Korean Human Rights, converting it into a “Center for Peaceful Coexistence on the Korean Peninsula.”
On Nov. 19, the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee convened a plenary meeting and passed without opposition next year’s budgets and financial management plans for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Unification, which including slashing the funding to establish the National Center for North Korean Human Rights and adding a budget outlay to establish the Center for Peaceful Coexistence on the Korean Peninsula.
This did not simply change the name above the door — it completely altered the center’s function and identity. It could weaken the center’s function to record, investigate and educate about North Korean human rights, and replace it with a new mission to promote reconciliation, coexistence and peace. This change could go beyond the policy preferences of a particular administration and become a problem that undermines South Korea’s long-standing commitments to human rights to the international community. The issue of North Korean human rights must not fluctuate in intensity with the political winds.
The internationally recognized universal value of human rights
For decades, the international community has raised the issues of North Korea’s political prison camps, forced labor, torture, public executions and imprisonment of repatriated North Korean defectors. The U.N. reports on these issues annually through its special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, while the European Union, the United States, Japan and others have continuously called for accountability through annual reports and resolutions on North Korean human rights.
Amid this trend, if the South Korean government were to change its policy course by replacing the planned National Center for North Korean Human Rights with a Center for Peaceful Coexistence on the Korean Peninsula, the international community might suspect South Korea had abandoned its past lead on the North Korean human rights issue. International scrutiny is not merely an outside evaluation — it is the benchmark of South Korea’s long-held moral leadership on human rights issues on the Korean Peninsula.
Policy consistency decides national credibility
The establishment of the National Center for North Korean Human Rights is a project on which the government spent budget money for several years. Yet the reconstitution of the planned center, away from human rights toward peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula, simply because the administration has changed, creates serious fissures in South Korea’s policy credibility.
If policy drastically changes with a change in administration, the costs of accumulation and sunk costs grow, and the accumulation of long-term policy experience is severed. The bigger problem is that South Korean society and the international community will begin to understand that Seoul’s human rights policy is subordinate to the administration in power.
Human rights are a core public value that must not be undermined even when an administration’s governing philosophy changes. Only when that value is upheld can a state be recognized for acting responsibly.
Witness testimony must not be subordinate to political rhetoric
Testimony of survivors of North Korea’s political prison camps, victims of sexual assault, people who were forcibly repatriated and defectors who lost their families cannot be selectively used by any one administration. Their testimony is the most powerful basis for making the international community understand the reality of North Korean human rights, as well as the reason why South Korea must systematize its recording of North Korean human rights.
The North Korean human rights center would be a symbolic and substantive device for preserving and researching this testimony and enabling the next generation to accurately understand the reality of North Korean human rights. If this function were replaced by an entity focused on peace and exchanges, the voice of the victims could lose institutional space, while historical records might be buried beneath the logic of coexistence.
Need for an independent human rights structure free from administration changes
North Korean human rights must not be undermined by a specific administration’s political agenda or diplomatic strategy. The principles of North Korean human rights that the South Korean government itself has long espoused before the international community include the following: protection of North Koreans’ lives, freedom and fundamental rights; the recording, preservation and international standardization of victim testimony; continuity of human rights policy across administrations; and monitoring and accountability in accordance with UN standards.
At the heart of these four items is constituency across administrations. The move to replace the North Korean human rights center with the Center for Peaceful Coexistence on the Korean Peninsula runs completely counter to this principle.
Conclusion: Human rights are a national promise, not political rhetoric
Slashing the budget for establishing the National Center for North Korean Human Rights and attempting to convert it into a Center for Peaceful Coexistence on the Korean Peninsula could become a decision that undermines South Korea’s internationally demonstrated leadership in human rights. Human rights are not a particular administration’s political language — they’re a promise made to the nation and international community before the victims.
Establishing a structure for human rights that is not undermined when administrations change is the minimum principle South Korea must demonstrate to the international community and the victims and a standard to which leaders must adhere in future policy discussions.
