The NHRC is an institution that designed to prod the government into putting the improvement of human rights conditions on the top of its agenda. From that perspective, the commission recommended that the Roh administration not only to scrap the National Security Law, as North Korea demands, but also to permit conscientious objection to South Korea’s mandatory military service, allow teachers and civil servants to engage in political activities and to let people get sex change operations on state medical insurance.

North Korea boasts the worst human rights conditions in the world. Constitutionally, North Koreans are our own people. If so, the NHRC ought to recommend that the president discusses the matter at the upcoming summit. Whether or not the president accepts their recommendation is a separate matter.

North Korea will obviously react strongly if South Korea makes even the slightest mention of human rights abuses during the summit. Even so, simply raising that topic during the summit would carry a profound significance by officially showing South Korea’s interest in North Korea’s human rights situation. Before reunification, East Germany had to accept persistent demands by West Germany to link economic assistance to the human rights situation even though it initially resisted the proposal.

The NHRC has made decisions calling for measures protecting human rights as far away as East Timor. It also opposed the dispatch of South Korean troops to Iraq, citing the need to protect the human rights of Iraqis. Yet at the same time the commission last year rejected a petition filed by human rights NGOs to save the lives of North Koreans facing public execution. The commission said they had no authority to make recommendations involving North Korean citizens.

The president himself has said a “strategic approach” is necessary every time the issue of North Korean human rights was raised. “Strategic approach” is synonymous with staying silent about any issue that might annoy North Korea. Lawmakers in the recently disbanded Uri Party even chided human rights activists, asking them whether they actually wanted to provoke a war with North Korea. For the three years since 2003, the South Korean government either abstained or stayed away from a UN vote calling on North Korea to clean up its human rights situation.

During the APEC summit, U.S. President George W. Bush sent North Korean leader Kim Jong-il a conciliatory message saying he would be willing to sign a peace treaty with North Korea if the communist country scraps its nuclear weapons program. At the same time, during an official speech, Bush did not forget to say, “We must work for the day when the people of North Korea enjoy the same freedoms as the citizens of their democratic neighbors.”

The day will come when the NHRC will be ashamed of its decision to ignore North Korea’s human rights abuses once again. That is how history progresses.