This is a joint event with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

Event Time: October 28, 12:00 PM (PDT)/3:00 PM (EDT)
Please register for this event at the CSIS event website, https://bit.ly/3DC4zI3.

While North Korea’s nuclear weapons and the security threat it poses have occupied the center stage and eclipsed other issues in recent years, human rights remain important to U.S. policy. The edited volume, The North Korean Conundrum, explores how dealing with the issue of human rights is shaped and affected by the political issues with which it is so entwined. In this book launch event, contributors of the book will discuss the relationship between human rights and denuclearization, and how North Koreans’ limited access to information is part of the problem, and how this is changing.

Speakers:
Victor Cha is Senior Vice President and Korea Chair at CSIS; Vice Dean for Faculty and Graduate Affairs & D.S. Song-KF Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He left the White House in 2007 after serving since 2004 as director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the White House, he was responsible primarily for Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Australia/New Zealand, and Pacific Island nation affairs. He was also the deputy head of delegation for the United States at the Six-Party Talks in Beijing and received two outstanding service commendations during his tenure at the NSC. He was the 2019-20 Koret Fellow for the winter quarter at Stanford.

Robert King served as the special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, an ambassadorial-ranked position, at the Department of State, from 2009 to 2017. He is a senior advisor to the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a senior fellow at the Korea Economic Institute, and a board member of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea in Washington, D.C. Ambassador King was the 2019-20 Koret Fellow for the fall quarter at Stanford.

Nat Kretchun is Vice President for Programs at the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a congressionally funded non-profit organization that supports the development and deployment of anti-censorship, privacy, and security technologies for populations living under repressive information censorship regimes.

Moderator:
Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Korea Program; the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, Stanford University