A Proposal for a Human Rights Contact Group on North Korea

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) is one of the world’s worst human rights violators. Over the course of six decades, the DPRK has conducted a targeted and brutal campaign to disenfranchise and supress its citizenry that has led to the deaths of millions of innocent North Korean civilians. In the face of sporadic international pressure, the DPRK has remained largely unmoved by traditional tools of coercion and deterrence, allowing a human rights crisis, which has been described as without “parallel in the contemporary world”, to persist on the Korean peninsula to this day.

Upon the release of the ground-breaking report of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on human rights in the DPRK (COI) in February 2014, new tools and options for change were presented to the international community in a series of recommendations. The United Nations (UN), regional organisations, states, local non-governmental actors, and global civil society were also made well-aware that mass exterminations, vast prison camp networks, forcible starvation, systematic rape, and the abuse of children are established tools of DPRK state policy. The question for all concerned is how to challenge these abuses?

At the time of writing, just one substantive recommendation has been met — 1225 C: the establishment of a field-based office in Seoul. Given the declared will of so many in the international community to bring about change in the DPRK, another recommendation, namely 1225 H, which called upon states to “form a human rights contact group to raise concerns about the situation of human rights in the [DPRK] and to provide support for initiatives to improve the situation”, is an ambitious, but eminently feasible, short to mid-term policy objective.

Acting as an innovative tool of international diplomacy, the contact group has begun to establish itself as an effective mechanism for peace, conflict resolution, and human security within international relations.

This exploratory paper considers the role of a human rights contact group in the regional context of North East Asia and asks whether such a group could develop into an effective instrument to improve human rights in the DPRK. Initial thoughts on the formation of a group are discussed and early ideas on group composition, leadership, and potential outcomes are proposed. Rather than offering a solution to the ongoing human rights crisis in the DPRK, this paper’s findings suggest that the establishment of a contact group would act as an important step towards establishing a regional dialogue on human rights in the DPRK.