The North Korean Refugee Crisis: Human Rights and International Response

Marcus Noland, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Stephan Haggard, University of California, San Diego
Yoonok Chang, Hansei University
Joshua Kurlantzick, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Andrei Lankov
Jana Mason

Abstract

North Korea typically enters the news through the lens of high politics and security. However, North Korea poses a host of human rights and humanitarian challenges as well, including well documented abuses of the most fundamental human rights and civil liberties, the maintenance of an elaborate Soviet-style gulag, the suppression of religion, and ongoing politically-derived problems of food security. To these must be added the problem of North Korean refugees, most of whom reside in China.

There are at least three reasons why the refugee issue must be viewed through a human rights prism:

- The first is that the flow of refugees stems in no small measure from human rights abuses in North Korea. Refugees are motivated strongly by economic deprivation in North Korea. But as other work by the Committee has shown, the economic collapse of the mid-1990s, the famine and, ongoing food shortages cannot be disentangled from fundamental features of the regime itself. Moreover, as Joshua Kurlantzick and Jana Mason argue forcefully in their contribution to this report, economic motivations do not relieve the international community of its obligations to these refugees, particularly when they are treated as political refugees by the sending country and subject to punishment for defection if they return.

- Second, the North Korean refugees raise human rights questions because of their treatment in the countries to which they initially flee, and most notably in China. As the contribution by Yoonok Chang shows, the very vulnerability of the refugees makes them subject to a variety of abuses including those perpetrated by employers, brokers, and individuals engaged in outright human trafficking.

- The third and final component of the human rights problem of the refugees concerns the obligations of the international community with respect to their ultimate domicile. North Korean refugees have managed to escape through China and reach Russia, Southeast Asia, and other destinations. Their treatment has been far from uniform, and in many cases they have been left dangling in a political and diplomatic limbo: unable to return to their home country because of conditions there; unable to stay where they are; yet also unable to move on. In the conclusion to this report, the nature of the American obligation in this regard is addressed.