The Disgraceful Fate of the N.Korea Human Rights Bill

The North Korean human rights bill has suffered a long, ignominious fate in the National Assembly. Since getting the green light from the parliamentary Foreign Affairs, Trade and Unification Committee in February 2010, it has been gathering dust and now faces automatic termination when the term of the incumbent National Assembly ends. Opposition lawmakers blocked its passage due to fears of agitating North Korea.

The bill requires the unification minister to set plans each year to support human rights reforms in the North and provide humanitarian assistance, while creating an archive to record evidence and testimonies of human rights abuses there. The bill demonstrates the attention South Koreans pay to the inhumane conditions North Koreans are suffering and aims to prompt Pyongyang to end these abuses.

The UN has adopted a North Korean human rights resolution every year since 2005, while lawmakers in the U.S. and Japan ratified North Korea-related human rights bills in 2004 and 2006. Around 20 lawmakers in the U.K. sent a letter to the heads of major political parties in South Korea in July last year urging the passage of the North Korea human rights bill. And in December last year, 149 activists working overseas sent a letter to the National Assembly voicing their "deep concern" over its failure to ratify the bill.

In 1948, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that reminds us of the horrible consequences from violating them, while guaranteeing each individual's freedom, equality, security, conscience, social benefits, religious preferences and protection from slavery, torture and forced exile. The rights group Freedom House placed North Korea at the bottom of 195 countries in terms of human rights abuses in its 2012 report on global freedom. And the personal accounts and testimonies of the 20,000 North Korean defectors are the best sources of evidence detailing the hellish conditions in the North's gulags.

Leftwing South Korean politicians cite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights every time they encounter a human rights abuse here. But they have yet to remember it when it comes to such abuses in the North. They simply insist that raising the issue would only exacerbate the situation in the North. This just shows that they are not true defenders of freedom.