NORTH KOREA: Tough Road Ahead for First U.N. Rights Envoy

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 11 2004 (IPS) - A respected Thai human rights scholar faces a mammoth challenge in trying to open doors in North Korea – deemed as one of the world’s most secretive and oppressive countries in the world.

Vitit Muntarbhorn, a 51-year-old international law professor at the prestigious Chulalongkorn University has little illusions about the task ahead, following his appointment as the first United Nations human rights envoy to investigate and report about the human rights climate in the East Asian nation.

”The physical access to the country is a challenging one,” he revealed in an interview with IPS. ”I would have to earn my credibility.”

His appointment this month as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the totalitarian state is officially known, does not entail him the privilege of flying into Pyongyang at his own choosing.

That decision is left to the North Korean government, which is lead by the reclusive President Kim Jong-il, better known in his country of 23 million people as the ‘Dear Leader’.

Military-ruled Burma offers a glimpse of how difficult such an invitation to an U.N. human rights envoy can be. Rangoon’s junta declined entry to successive U.N. human rights envoys for eight years since 1992.

Yozo Yokota, a Japanese, who was appointed the first U.N. human rights envoy to investigate political and civil liberties in Burma, was not permitted entry into Rangoon during his tenure from 1992-1996.

His successor, Rajsoomer Lallah from Mauritius was also given the cold shoulder by the military government during his term as U.N. human rights envoy for Burma from 1996-2000.

Both special rapporteurs had to submit their reports to the annual U.N. Human Rights Commission held every April in Geneva based on information gathered beyond Burma’s borders.

It was only the Brazilian academic Paulo Sergio Pinheiro who broke new ground, when Rangoon extended its first invitation to a human rights envoy in December, 2000.

Vitit’s appointment brings to four the number of Asian countries that have special human rights envoys assigned by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR). They are Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia and North Korea.

”The international political implications of the appointment cannot be minimised, since North Korea is known as a rouge state,” Gotham Ayra, head of Forum-Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights lobby, told IPS.

”On the one hand, it can be seen as more criticism to come. But on the other, this is a positive decision, because the situation in North Korea would be better known with credibility,” he added.

He also welcomed the choice of an Asian for the role, since ”with closer cultural affinity, the learning gap is narrower.”

Vitit has also gained the confidence of the human rights community due to the work he accomplished during another U.N. assignment from 1990-1994 – as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.

The groundwork for the current appointment was laid at this April’s sessions in Geneva of the UNCHR, the premier rights forum of the global body, when it passed a resolution singling out the pervasive rights violations in North Korea and endorsing a need for a special envoy.

That resolution, a milestone at the UNCHR, expressed concern ”about reports of systemic, widespread and grave violations of human rights.”

They included torture, public executions, extra-judicial detentions and imposition of the death penalty for political reasons.

The resolution also took Pyongyang to task for ”the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labour and lack of respect for the rights of persons deprived of the liberties.”

In July, a bill passed in the U.S. Congress – the North Korean Human Rights Act – listed a litany of prevailing abuses, including an estimated 200,000 political prisoners in North Korean jails, some of whom have been used for fatal chemical experiments.

Since the 1990s, between half a million to three million North Koreans have died due to famine.

And the increasing stream of defectors from North Korea, which was established as an independent communist-ruled country in 1948, reflects the dissatisfaction that prevails within its borders.

This year alone 1,210 have fled, and in 2003 the numbers was 1,285 while in 2002 it was 1,140.

Yet despite being deemed a pariah state and one among the three nations who make up U.S. President George W. Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil,’ the country has not walled itself off from the entire U.N. family.

Currently five U.N. agencies maintain a presence in North Korea, with the largest being the World Food Programme (WFP), which has access to 161 of the 203 counties in the country.

”The very fact that the international community has a presence here is an achievement,” Gerald Bourke, WFP spokesman on North Korea, said in a telephone interview from Beijing.

But while the situation in North Korea has ”progressively improved” over the past three years, ”we still don’t have access to all the people,” he added.

In fact, U.N. officials working in the totalitarian state have to get approval from the authorities to travel, consequently cutting off random encounters with the local population.

Bourke cautions against hopes of a breakthrough with the appointment of the first human rights envoy to North Korea. ”The only way forward here is slow motion, taking small steps,” he said. ”You are not going to get dramatic change.”

Vitit appears ready to summon up his diplomatic skills and patience to make headway. ”I would urge the North Korean authorities to see it as a window of opportunity.”