Nothing has changed in North Korea

Historic Trump-Kim Singapore summit failed to halt the rogue state's crimes against humanity

U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held their historic summit in Singapore on June 12 last year, the first time the leader of the free world and the leader of the world’s most repressive dictatorship had met face to face.

That encounter also took place on the anniversary of a famous speech by another American president addressing a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship — Ronald Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech, 32 years ago on that same date.

Ahead of the Singapore summit, I argued that President Trump should follow his predecessor’s example and put human rights clearly on the agenda alongside security. I said that he should paraphrase President Reagan and tell the North Korean dictator: “Mr. Kim, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Korean Peninsula, if you seek liberalization: Come to the prison camps! Mr. Kim, open the gates to the gulags! Mr. Kim, tear down the walls of the gulags! Mr. Kim, free all your political prisoners.”

To the best of my knowledge, and without being privy to what was said in their private discussions, Trump did not do this. A year on, what is there to show for it?

Not only has there been little meaningful progress on the question of denuclearization, with the follow-up summit between the two leaders in Hanoi eight months later collapsing, but there has been no sign of any progress on human rights in North Korea.

Rumors that Kim had executed his envoy, Kim Hyok-chol, and four other negotiators, and sent another, Kim Yong-chol, to a forced labor camp, appear to be wrong, but the mere fact that major international media initially reported them as fact is a sign of what we have come to expect from this regime.

It is five years since a United Nations Commission of Inquiry, established by the Human Rights Council and ably chaired by Australian judge Michael Kirby, concluded that the North Korean regime was committing crimes against humanity. It said that the “gravity, scale and nature” of the violations of human rights in North Korea “reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world” and it called for North Korea’s leaders to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court.

Five years on, and the gravity, scale and nature of the crimes against humanity which the U.N. inquiry documented have not changed, but no action has been taken. Every one of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ 30 articles is denied or violated in North Korea, yet no one has been held to account.

Towards the end of last month, the United Nations published a new report, which claimed that the people of North Korea are “trapped in a vicious cycle, in which the failure of the state to provide for life’s basic necessities forces them to turn to rudimentary markets where they face a host of human rights violations in an uncertain legal environment.” The U.N. accuses the North Korean regime of violating the rights to food, health, shelter, work and freedom of movement, making such basic liberties dependent “on the ability of individuals to bribe state officials.”

According to the U.N., in 2019 about 10.9 million North Koreans — more than 43 percent of the population — are undernourished and suffer from food insecurity. Almost 10 million have no access to safe drinking water, while 16 percent of the population have no access to basic sanitation. The 2018 Global Hunger Index classified the level of hunger in the country as serious” and “bordering on alarming.”

Meanwhile, as the U.N. notes, “huge resources continue to be directed towards military spending.” North Korea has one of the world’s largest standing armies — as a ratio of military personnel to population, it is the largest. More than a million young people are taken from the workplace into the military. How can anyone claim that security and human rights are separate issues?