Human Security
Looking at North Korea through the UN’s human security lens including: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security.
A United Nations Commission of Inquiry for North Korea
On March 21, 2013 the 47-member state Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC), a subsidiary organ of the United Nations General Assembly, adopted a resolution that establishes a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) to investigate more fully the severe human rights violations in North Korea, and to determine whether those violations amount to crimes against [...]
North Korea Faces Heightened Human Rights Scrutiny
On March 21, 2013 the United Nations Human Rights Council, a body of 47 states, adopted by consensus a resolution to establish a commission of inquiry (COI) into North Korea’s “systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights.” The commission is to be composed of three experts who will intensively investigate for a period of one [...]
An American NGO…in North Korea
This article was originally published by The Atlantic on December 15, 2012, and has been reproduced with permission. * * * The United States has boots on the ground in North Korea. Cowboy boots, size 10 Durangos, and they belong to Rob Springs, a Korean-speaking Arizona rancher. Springs and his cowboy boots made their 66th visit to North [...]
North Korea Out of the Dark: The Story of the Pyongyang Business School
How a promising reform project brought good business practices to the world's most isolated country. Felix Abt (right) welcomes graduate students to a seminar at the PBS (Pyongyang Business School) under the watchful eyes of the country’s leaders, Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. The slight downward slant in their portraits creates an illusion [...]
The Canada-DPRK Knowledge Partnership Program (KPP)
Knowledge sharing is a powerful tool to promote economic growth and improve quality of life in developing countries. It gives participants access not only to practical information, but the worldview, motivations, and experiences of their partners. Sharing of this nature facilitates mutual understanding between individuals that, in turn, builds [...]
The Fiction of the North Korean Refugee Orphan
Recently fast-tracked to the House floor, HR 1464 (“The North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011”) has passed the House. Exploiting the rhetoric of humanitarian rescue, the bill identifies North Korean hunger as the problem and proposes U.S. adoption of North Korean children as the solution, making the figure of the hungry North Korean [...]
