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The Role of the Special Envoy

As the Biden administration begins to review policy towards North Korea in earnest, King’s book and perspectives are particularly timely. Drawing on over a decade of experience, King explains how the role of the special envoy provides a unique opportunity to influence the policy agenda on human rights. As a senior member within the U.S. State Department, the envoy is in a position to both elevate the importance of rights violations to policymakers in Washington and provide feedback on how policy decisions impact the situation on the ground.     

King outlines several avenues where U.S. policymakers can increase pressure on North Korea to address the ongoing human rights crisis in the country. Predominantly among them is the recommendation to support the work on human rights already done by the UN and UN agencies, such as the reporting of Special Rapporteur Tomás Quintana.

“North Korea is very sensitive about its international legitimacy,” King notes. “Working through the UN and with UN agencies gives greater validity and acceptability to the human rights issues and puts greater pressure on North Korea to follow international norms.”

King’s other recommendations center more directly on the people of North Korea. He urges ongoing support for initiatives and agreements that foster access to information and proper distribution of resources and aid for North Koreans within the country along with freedom of movement for those who are attempting to leave and face crossing hostile borders into China. 

Responsibilities in Seoul

Speaking as King’s counterpart and colleague in South Korea, Jung-Hoon Lee echoed the need for visibility and accountability — both globally and in South Korea — for the DPRK's human rights crisis. “In the public eye and the global context, the human rights condition in North Korea is not very familiar. Why? There’s no access. The North Korean society is completely cocooned. There are terrible human rights conditions in other parts of the world, but there is access in those cases to see what is going on. In North Korea, there are only testimonials. There are no pictures or documentaries of the gulags and atrocities. That’s why it is so important that we keep raising this issue.”

For Lee, this means working with and through many of the same channels that King points to, such as the UN, and recognizing as a global community the scale of the crimes against humanity being committed.

But it also means accepting responsibilities closer to home. Lee firmly rejects the opinion raised by the South Korean Foreign Minister that refocusing on North Korean human rights and reappointing an ambassador to fill Lee’s now-vacant position is “useless.” Such indifference towards human rights issues in North Korea is damaging, warns Lee, citing the scrutiny South Korea suffered during the recent Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearings before the U.S. Congress.

The Road Towards Accountability

Human rights are only one facet of U.S. policy toward North Korea, but we undermine the overall relationship with the North if the United States abandons human rights in pursuit of security or economic goals, writes King in his book. "Policy toward North Korea involves interrelated issues that we frequently separate for analytical purposes or because they are dealt with in different ways or by different means. But these issues are interconnected, and they are not really separable."

Ultimately, any meaningful action to address North Korea's human rights violations will require coordinated efforts from international organizations, national governments, and civic organizations. In the third and final part of the Korea Program’s spring 2021 series on human rights in North Korea, forthcoming on May 20, leaders from the private sector will discuss the challenges of bringing together independent actors and organizations to raise awareness and call for accountability in North Korea. Registration for the event is open to the public.  

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Exploring Means of Enforcing Accountability

Speaking as an independently acting investigator, Special Rapporteur Tomás Ojea Quintana echoed the findings of his predecessors in warning that the activity within North Korea has escalated from human rights violations to international crimes against humanity, including extermination, enslavement, torture, sexual violence, and knowingly inflicting prolonged starvation.

What governing body has the ability to hold national leadership at the highest level accountable for such crimes? Quintana outlines several options. One is the International Criminal Court, the international tribunal seated in The Hauge. However, superpower nations such as the United States, China, and Russia are historically recalcitrant to the jurisdiction of this legal body and could feasibly veto a case against the DPRK sent to the ICC.

Another option is for the UN Security Council to create a hybrid tribunal through which international prosecution could litigate. This option is more ad hoc, but would circumvent some of the potential veto pitfalls to using the ICC.

The Secretary General of the United Nations could also use the pejoratives given under Article 99 of the United Nations Charter to force action and accountability forward. This would be a difficult and even unprecedented means of jurisdiction, but it is supported by an already existing, if rarely enacted, legal framework.

Moving Forward

Each of the avenues proposed by Special Rapporteur Quintana has varying levels of efficacy and shortcomings, particularly in the immediate context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the further hindrance it has created to gathering evidence and intelligence directly from North Korea. As Roberta Cohen notes,

“No possibility exists right now for International Criminal Court referral, or establishing an ad hoc tribunal, but progress is nonetheless being made in laying the groundwork for eventual criminal prosecution and other aspects of transitional justice.”

Former Ambassador Joon Oh echoes the importance of keeping the issue of human rights and international crimes in North Korea in the spotlight even if immediate legal options stall.

“The issue of accountability is extremely important. These alternative ways [of creating accountability] should be explored. Exploring these avenues adds pressure on North Korea. Even remote possibilities add pressure, which might help change their behavior.”

On April 26, 2021, Ambassador Robert King, former U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean human rights issues will continue the dialogue on accountability in North Korea with a discussion of his forthcoming book, Patterns of Impunity: Human Rights in North Korea and the Role of the U.S. Special Envoy, and the role the South Korean and U.S. governments play in promoting human rights in North Korea. Registration for the book launch is open through the day of the event.  

South Korean President Moon Jae-in's Democratic Party suffered a devastating defeat in a special election for mayoral posts in the country’s two largest cities, Seoul and Busan. “These mayoral elections became a referendum on the ruling party,” says APARC and Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin in an interview on CNBC Squawk Box Asia. “South Korean voters gave the Moon administration a red card.”

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Anger at soaring housing prices and ongoing investigations into accusations of corruption has decimated the credibility of Moon and his left-leaning Democratic Party in the eyes of many voters. “The South Korean people have begun to believe that the current government is quite incompetent,” Shin says. In the foreign policy arena, too, the Moon administration has been on a downhill slide. It has failed to make a breakthrough on the stalemate with North Korea, has seen the relationship with Japan deteriorating to the worst it has ever been and is struggling to contend with China.

But it is domestic policy, particularly containing housing prices, that will be the key issue in next year’s presidential election, Shin argues. Another issue to watch is COVID-19, he notes. A year ago, South Korean voters rewarded the administration’s handling of the pandemic, but now the government is facing a backlash over its slow vaccine rollout.

This interview with APARC and Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin was originally published in Asia Experts Forum, a student-curated journal from the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. Ava Liao, a student journalist pursuing a dual major in International Relations and Media Studies, reported this story.

While Korean national identity was historically defined against Japanese imperialism, in more recent times Korean identity is responding to new influences related to globalization. How has Korean national identity been shaped by the distinctly Korean policy of segyehwa in the face of globalization?

Japanese colonialism was instrumental to the formation of Korean national identity. The Korean peninsula is surrounded by big powers such as China, Japan, and Russia. Even today, these influences are still very strong. A sense of threat is still there. Furthermore, although Korea is divided into North and South, Koreans share a strong sense of ethnic unity. Both North and South Koreans believe that they belong to a single nation, ethnicity, and race. For Koreans, this conflation of nation, ethnicity and race emphasizes the idea that there is a single bloodline going back to Dangun, a common ancestor and the mythic founder of the Korean nation. Even though they are divided, both sides believe that it is unnatural and only temporary and that they will eventually be reunified. 

Korea is very homogeneous; only about five percent of the population is non-ethnic Korean. The issue of maintaining social cohesion in the face of a growing power of globalization ironically strengthens ethnic identity. South Korea is trying to promote Korean culture on the world stage. Look at BTS, for example, and Parasite. Korean culture becoming popular around the world is fairly new and Koreans are really proud of that. The economy has grown greatly, it is a G20 country, and South Korea is proud of exporting its culture so successfully. With globalization, there have also been further efforts to absorb the overseas Korean population into the Korean identity and to utilize them as representatives in their host or resident countries. All these interrelated factors shape Korean national identity.

Your 2012 article “Racist South Korea? Diverse but Not Tolerant of Diversity,” concludes that although South Korea has become multi-ethnic, it has yet to become multicultural. It also outlines how foreigners, migrant workers of Korean ethnicity, and those with darker skin color often face discrimination in South Korea. Have these dynamics changed significantly since 2012?

Not so much. South Korea has been promoting multiculturalism as a policy initiative since 2006, so it is a fairly new phenomenon in Korean society. Foreign brides—from China, Vietnam, and other countries—marry Korean men and move to South Korea. They make contributions to the reproduction of the nation, which has an aging population and a low birth rate. It becomes a question of how to assimilate, and how these foreign brides can be integrated into Korean society. Even though the rhetoric is inclusive, in reality it is not very much so. Foreign brides are taught to assimilate into Korean culture and society, for example, by learning the Korean language, how to make kimchi, and how to respect the elderly. Another respect is in migrant labor, especially unskilled workers from developing countries. They are basically on a temporary visa, have little legal protection, and face a great deal of discrimination. Lower-class ethnic Koreans from China and North Korean defectors are also looked down upon, even if they belong to the same Korean nation. There is a gap between perception and reality. While they are told that they belong to the same nation and ethnicity, in reality, what really matters is class. Class matters much more than ethnicity, nationality, or even citizenship in practice. Foreign brides, migrant workers, and North Korean defectors are treated much poorly in South Korea than say, middle-class Korean-Americans or professionals from developed countries.

Your article also features Park No-Ja’s argument that colorism and white supremacy are inextricably linked in South Korean society. Why is this phenomenon prevalent across East Asia and Southeast Asia?

It reflects the reality of who has power in the world. If you refer back to history, this is very Orientalist thinking. Orientalism is the understanding of the East from the Western perspective, and Asians have not been able to overcome Orientalism. Even in Korea as I mentioned earlier, there is much higher regard for white people coming from developed countries, in comparison to Asians from developing parts of Asia, or Africans. They are not shown much respect. Even with Japan challenging the United States as a competing power in the 1980s and now China, Asians are generally not respected on the international stage as much as Americans, for example. Ironically, that is quite true, or even worse in Asia. 

The Black Lives Matter protest movement that began in the United States has greatly expanded in its global reach, although less so in East Asia. Why has the BLM movement against racism found so little resonance or support in East Asian countries?

If you compare the Black Lives Matter movement to the #MeToo movement, the #MeToo movement had much greater impact in South Korea. BLM has not had very much impact so far in South Korea, Japan, or China for different reasons. Korea had a very strong feminist movement already. #MeToo was immediately embraced by feminists and developed very quickly, but BLM has hardly found any resonance or community in East Asia. 

For Japan and South Korea, ethnic homogeneity is still very strong. There are ethnic minorities, but the population is very small. There have been some movements from ethnic minorities in Japan, but they have very little voice and are not as well-organized as BLM here. In the case of Korea, once again, most ethnic minorities are foreigners and often temporary residents, whereas black people have a much longer history in the U.S. In Korea, the majority came as adults, rather than being born and growing up there. There are some NGOs advocating for the rights of those migrants, but their impact is still limited. China is a different case. The Chinese government officially recognizes 56 different ethnic groups, with Han Chinese being the majority. China is very nervous about the breakup of the national minority structure, which is why they are repressing Xinjiang and Tibet. China suppresses any movements advocating for independence of national minorities. Japan, Korea, and China have not been much receptive to the BLM movement, for these different reasons. 

We can learn a lot from the BLM movement in studying racism in Asia but there exists a separation between Asian Studies and ethnic studies. While race and ethnicity are popular topics of discussion in the U.S., they are not much talked about in Japan or South Korea, which may also explain why there is so little resonance in East Asian countries. We, Asian experts, need to learn from the insights of ethnic studies in addressing racism in Asia.

South Korea notably has no legal protections against racial discrimination. Is this likely to change in the future, given the changing values of the younger generation?

Overall, Korea is improving protection against discrimination, especially with regards to gender and sexual minorities. They are moving in the right direction. In contrast, racial discrimination does not get much attention from the public, the media, or the government because the ethnic minority population is so small. The same goes to religious minority. For example, there are more than 100,000 Muslims in Korea right now, but there are very few Koreans who even know that there are so many Muslims. Most of them do not really understand Muslim culture, and may mainly associate them with terrorists. It is a lack of understanding and ignorance, and even though they exist, Koreans just ignore them. The Black community in Korea is even smaller, so they do not see it affecting Korean society that much. They understand that it is a global issue, but do not see it as their issue yet. 

How has the outbreak of COVID-19 exacerbated racial inequalities in South Korea?

COVID-19 certainly made the situation much more difficult for the foreign unskilled workers in Korea. The majority of them are physical workers in non-office jobs, which means they cannot work remotely. Many of them have been forced out of jobs, so they either have to go back to their country of origin or stay in Korea without stimulus funds or medical and other financial assistance that are available to Korean citizens. Many of them are also illegal or unregistered workers, so they have to hide from the government even if they do have symptoms or come into contact with the virus. Recently, there has been a number of unassisted COVID-19 deaths of unregistered foreign workers in Korea because they avoided seeking medical treatment out of a fear that they might be deported. The pandemic has also increased inequalities for society as a whole, so those already suffering from racial inequality experience it even more. Even here in the U.S., it is one story if a white male spreads COVID-19, but it is another if a Chinese one spreads it. There are similar aspects of racial discrimination in Korea. It makes bigger news if a foreign worker spreads the virus, and feeds into the same kind of prejudice.

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Published in APARC’s in-house series, the book is the second volume resulting from APARC’s Stanford Asia-Pacific Research Innovation project. It collects the research findings of participants at the project’s third conference that was held in South Korea in June 2019.

James Liang, a research professor of economics at Peking University and a leading scholar of demographics and social studies, opened the event by situating the discussion about population structure in the context of the U.S.-China technology race. China is quickly catching up with the United States in the quality of its talent pool and the number of its labor resources. It will continue to outpace and surpass the United States in talent and innovation power in the next 10-20 years, Liang says.

China, however, is on a demographic cliff, facing severe population aging and low fertility rates. Its population of young workers aged 25-44 year-olds is projected to decline much faster and sooner than its overall population, leveling out against the labor and innovation gains the United States makes through the inflow of international talent into U.S. universities and entrepreneurial ventures. To sustain its long-term growth in labor quality and innovation, China will need higher birth rates and additional talent gains through migration, argues Liang.

James Feyrer’s book chapter examines the macroeconomic relationship between workforce demographics and aggregate productivity in Asia. Feyrer confirms that the high-income Asian nations like Japan and Korea, and even some middle-income countries of the region, will no longer enjoy a “demographic dividend” boosting aggregate productivity. However, he finds that the negative consequences of shifting to an older population structure may be less severe than previously projected, and even weakening with time. Feyrer believes this may be a result of improved food security and better overall health experienced by old cohorts in childhood, reinforcing the long-reaching impacts of healthcare on societal well-being.

Joon-Shik Park focused on the specific challenges facing Korean society, where birth rates have dropped severely. These historic declines continue to contribute to rising social and political unevenness across Korean society today. Initially seen most visibly in rural areas and smaller villages, Park’s now sees this unevenness affecting the dynamics of medium-sized towns and more urban areas as well. Korea and other aging societies must find viable solutions to address these issues if they are to prevent demographic divides from hobbling development and innovation, Park says.

Closing the book launch event, APARC Research scholar Kenji Kushida offers perspectives from rapidly aging Japan. where the challenges of shrinking and aging populations, rural-to-urban population distribution, and labor shortages spur advances in technology and innovation. Kushida documents this trend across multiple sectors.

He shows that drone technology has increased the productivity of short-staffed surveying firms, while AI-assisted industrial machines allow a broader range of laborers to work in manufacturing. Even in traditionally human-dominated environments like nursing homes, staff increasingly use robots to help improve the physical and mental well-being of elderly patients. Rather than strictly retarding growth, Kushida makes the case that demographic challenges serve as a catalyst for the development and implementation of new technologies.

As the research collected in Demographics and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific demonstrates, the challenges facing aging Asian societies are complex, but there is reason to look to the future with optimism. As the editors of the volume state in their introduction to the book, “Few concepts are as critical for sustained improvement in living standards as innovation.” New technologies and solutions will be foundational to addressing the challenges of the new demographic frontiers many societies are now approaching.