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The human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea or DPRK) is exceptionally challenging to address externally, as the population remains isolated from the international community and lacks an independent civil society to advocate for people’s rights.

Despite these difficulties, the situation has been captured and documented primarily through the ‘voices’ of North Korean defectors, which has resulted in it becoming one of the longest-standing and most prominent human rights concerns discussed within the UN human rights mechanisms today. 

Since the 1990s, documentation efforts have been conducted at various levels by different actors through interviews with North Korean defectors, providing valuable resources for evaluating and increasing awareness of the human rights situation in North Korea. Meanwhile, the release of the Report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK in 2014, which concluded that “systematic, widespread, and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed” in North Korea, has shifted the discussion to the realm of international criminal law and the issue of accountability. This shift signifies that the documentation of human rights may not solely aim to understand or raise awareness of the observed human rights situation in the DPRK but also serves as potential evidence for future individual criminal prosecutions.

While multiple actors continue to record the memories of North Korean defectors, the enactment of the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2016 led to the establishment of the Center for North Korean Human Rights Records under the Ministry of Unification in the Republic of Korea (South Korea). This Center is tasked with collecting and recording information on the status of human rights in North Korea through interviews with nearly all North Korean defectors who have resettled in South Korea. Furthermore, the selected materials gathered by the Center are to be transferred to the North Korea Human Rights Archive, an organ under the Ministry of Justice responsible for preserving and managing these records, following the model of the Central Registry of State Judicial Administrations in Salzgitter, which formerly existed in the Federal Republic of Germany.

In this context, several questions arise: Under what conditions are these extensive records being compiled and scrutinised? What purposes do they serve, and how are they being utilised or intended to be utilised? What is required for this recording process to align with key principles of human rights advocacy and monitoring? Should these records be publicly released? With these questions in mind, this talk explores the various entities involved in documenting North Korea’s human rights situation in South Korea, their objectives, and areas of focus, while analysing the challenges and limitations surrounding the process of compiling memories of the human rights situation in the DPRK.

About the speaker

Yejoon Rim is an Associate Professor at Korea University, College of Public Policy. She holds a Ph.D. in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and her research interests lie in public international law, with a particular focus on statehood, government, and human rights. Before joining the faculty, she was a research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

She is currently a visiting scholar at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. 

Registration

This event is free, open to the public and held in person only. If you would like to attend, please register using the link above.

• Organiser: SOAS Centre of Korean Studies
• Contact: centres@soas.ac.uk

Header image credit: 'People line up in front of a mural in Pyongyang, North Korea' by Thomas Evans via Unsplash.