[Future of North Korea 5] Reform of North Korea’s Survival Strategy with the Emphasis on Human Rights Issue

Abstract 

This paper analyzes the significance of human rights issues in North Korea’s survival strategy and suggests a direction for North Korea to successfully design and promote its strategy under the international political arena where not only national prosperity and military power but also soft power such as knowledge, human rights, and environment issues. Today, because the U.N. has assessed North Korea as having poor human rights conditions, according to U.N. special procedure it has adopted human rights resolutions, levying political and diplomatic pressures on Pyongyang’s survival strategy. Therefore, North Korea needs a new set of strategy so that improvement in human rights issues and security concerns of the regime do not have a negative correlation. A two-tier change involving the U.N. and each individual country to coordinate the relationship is recommended, and the North should also develop policies to accept human rights values, combining sun-kyung (economy-first) and sun-min (people-first) rather than focusing on the security of the regime only. In addition, it is necessary to expand the cooperation network for human rights issues among the U.N., other individual countries and North Korea, to build a regional level human rights regime where North Korea can participate, and to promote cooperation between the Two Koreas.

The full text in Korean is available here