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North Korea wants key parts of U.N. human rights resolution dropped

Kyodo

NEW YORK – North Korean officials are seeking to have key lines deleted from a draft U.N. resolution that calls for a referral of Pyongyang’s human rights abuses to the International Criminal Court and proposes sanctions against the country’s top leaders, according to a U.N. investigator.

Marzuki Darusman, a special rapporteur of human rights in North Korea recounted his “unexpected” meeting on Monday with four officials from the country. They suggested making the changes in the document in exchange for an offer to visit the secluded country. He had previously been barred from visiting North Korea because of his human rights investigations.

The draft resolution has been circulated by Japan, the European Union and other co-sponsors at the U.N. General Assembly’s Third Committee hearing on human rights issues, where Darusman delivered a report.

Citing the U.N. commission of inquiry’s report, the resolution says that “the body of testimony gathered and the information received provide reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed” in the country, “pursuant to policies at the highest level of the states for decades.”

In addition to the ICC referral of North Korea’s rights abuses, the draft document also encourages the U.N. Security Council to consider “the scope for effective targeted sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible for acts that the commission has said may constitute crimes against humanity.”

These points, raised in the seventh and eighth paragraphs in the document, are problematic for Pyongyang, Darusman said on Tuesday, even though the country’s leader Kim Jong Un is not named.

“Those are the parts of the text that they’ve asked to be deleted so that they could be in a position to issue an invitation,” Darusman explained.

An EU spokesman said that “the EU and its co-sponsors will look at any proposals made by the DPRK” with the objective of improving the human rights situation in the country, which is officially called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Darusman spoke about his meeting with the North Koreans as a positive one and suggested that a visit could be possible, but could not be based on a “snap decision.” It would have to be carried out with a “substantive and effective objective,” he said.

“Any visit would have to be undertaken with a view to allow the rapporteur access into any location, institution, which would be a primary concern of the international community,” Darusman added.

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  • Ron NJ

    Any more bargaining and placating the DPRK is basically equivalent to being the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century. Turn your backs and let North Korea work itself out – they’re going to continue genociding their own people either way, no reason to have a hand in it by shipping them tons (literal tons) of food or supplying them with energy and foreign currency so as to help them carry it out and prolong their present wacked out, belligerent, oppresive commu-dicta-monarchy. If you aren’t going to forcefully topple what everyone agrees is pretty much one of the worst dictatorships on earth then you ought to just pull out completely and let them sort it out for themselves, *without* foreign aid to their government and army (which is where all of the foreign-supply food and oil actually goes).

    • phu

      The only problem I have with this is that North Korea working itself out is what’s gotten it to this point. Granted, certainly, international stupidity with concessions and aid has helped it limp along for the last few years (at least), but the larger problem is that — as you mention — we’re not just sometimes ignoring, sometimes supporting, but always failing to derail one of the most abusive states on the planet.

      Military intervention has a long history of not helping in most places, but in this case, I’d have to say an invasion seems like a viable way to clean up. The people don’t have the perspective or means, and we know the government is interested only in perpetuating itself.

      Not that it’d ever happen. The only body that could really approve that is the UN, a toothless collection of bureaucrats afraid of offending anyone or actually doing anything.

      My extreme viewpoints aside, though… North Korea is probably just going to keep slowly destroying its people while the rest of the world wrings its hands and asks ever more stridently for useless reports that won’t be acted on. So goes the United Nations and international diplomacy in general.