U.S. President Barack Obama last week nominated Robert King, a former aide to the late Tom Lantos, as a special envoy for North Korean human rights. Now a bipartisan group of U.S. congressmen have called for a reexamination of the issue of North Korean defectors.

On the initiative of Democrat Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Republican Senator Sam Brownback, Congress has recently instructed the Government Accountability Office to inspect government offices' North Korean refugee policy, a source in Washington said.

According to the source, U.S. Congress instructed the GAO to inspect the U.S. administration, in the belief that there has been no significant change in the U.S. administration's policy on North Korean refugees even after Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2004.

The U.S. has been criticized for having accepted only about 90 North Korean refugees so far, despite the legal ground for accepting such refugees under the act.

As a result, the GAO is conducting an intensive investigation of the status of North Korean refugees in China and Southeast Asia and on how cooperative U.S. embassies in that area are when they apply for entry to the U.S. It will also interview North Korean refugees who have recently settled in the U.S.

The source said this is the first time the GAO has conducted a comprehensive audit of the North Korean refugee issue. It seems likely that the outcome will be used to raise public awareness about North Korean refugees and North Korean human rights issues.