북한 인권 문제 해결의 王道는 북한의 自由化다 (It Takes Liberation of North Korea to Improve Its Human Rights Situations)

서지정보

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· 저자명 : 이동복

초록

The public debate, both within and without the country, over the North Korean human right issue is now entering a new dimension as the controversy is intensifying over a new recent Chinese move to repatriate additional North Korean asylum seekers to North Korea despite the obvious risk of subjecting them to inhuman punishments by the North Korean authorities.
While China continues to hold on to her argument that the deportation of the North Korean defectors caught on the Chinese territory is a legitimate exercise of her sovereignty because they are “not refuges qualified for protection under international humanitarian laws” as they are simply “economically motivated illegal immigrants,” there are nevertheless indications that the Chinese argument is giving some signs of cracks due to its incompatibility with the provisions of the United Nations Convention on Torture that manifestly prohibits all its signatories from “expelling, returning (“refouler”) or extraditing a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture” regardless of whether that person is qualified as a ‘refugee’ or not.
Considering the fact that China is the only country in alliance with North Korea providing the latter with a shield against the mounting international pressure on the issue of North Korea’s human rights, it looks conceivable that a weakened Chinese position on the issue of deportation of the North Korean asylum seekers caught in China might leave North Korea more susceptible to international pressures on its human rights situations.
It needs to be pointed out, however, that China’s deportation of the North Korean asylum seekers caught in China is but a tip of the iceberg as a human rights issue when viewed against the larger context of the North Korean human rights issue, which is essentially one that has to do with the fact that North Korea is a country where its entire population is denied all of the “inalienable basic rights and freedoms” guaranteed under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The fact that North Korea’s constitution does contain provisions on some of the basic rights and freedoms is merely a sham as the country is constitutionally governed by the totalitarian norm of “one for all and all for one” that features a wholesale expropriation of individual rights and freedoms by the state, making it practically difficult, if not impossible, to have the human rights situations improved without a regime change.
A ‘sunshine’ approach does not look relevant as an option to cause a meaningful improvement in North Korea’s human rights situations, as North Korea takes advantage of it merely as a means to prolong its repressive regime further at the expense of rights and freedoms of the people. With North Korea now clearly in a state of limbo going through yet another round of hereditary succession of power, the third of its kind, it is perhaps time now to consider revisiting, for its application to North Korea, the ‘crusade’ that U.S. President Ronald Reagan mobilized against Poland in 1980s that led to the liberation of Poland from the yoke of Communist tyranny and set the stage for the collapse of Communism that ensued in East European countries in a chain reaction.

영어초록

The public debate, both within and without the country, over the North Korean human right issue is now entering a new dimension as the controversy is intensifying over a new recent Chinese move to repatriate additional North Korean asylum seekers to North Korea despite the obvious risk of subjecting them to inhuman punishments by the North Korean authorities.
While China continues to hold on to her argument that the deportation of the North Korean defectors caught on the Chinese territory is a legitimate exercise of her sovereignty because they are “not refuges qualified for protection under international humanitarian laws” as they are simply “economically motivated illegal immigrants,” there are nevertheless indications that the Chinese argument is giving some signs of cracks due to its incompatibility with the provisions of the United Nations Convention on Torture that manifestly prohibits all its signatories from “expelling, returning (“refouler”) or extraditing a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture” regardless of whether that person is qualified as a ‘refugee’ or not.
Considering the fact that China is the only country in alliance with North Korea providing the latter with a shield against the mounting international pressure on the issue of North Korea’s human rights, it looks conceivable that a weakened Chinese position on the issue of deportation of the North Korean asylum seekers caught in China might leave North Korea more susceptible to international pressures on its human rights situations.
It needs to be pointed out, however, that China’s deportation of the North Korean asylum seekers caught in China is but a tip of the iceberg as a human rights issue when viewed against the larger context of the North Korean human rights issue, which is essentially one that has to do with the fact that North Korea is a country where its entire population is denied all of the “inalienable basic rights and freedoms” guaranteed under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The fact that North Korea’s constitution does contain provisions on some of the basic rights and freedoms is merely a sham as the country is constitutionally governed by the totalitarian norm of “one for all and all for one” that features a wholesale expropriation of individual rights and freedoms by the state, making it practically difficult, if not impossible, to have the human rights situations improved without a regime change.
A ‘sunshine’ approach does not look relevant as an option to cause a meaningful improvement in North Korea’s human rights situations, as North Korea takes advantage of it merely as a means to prolong its repressive regime further at the expense of rights and freedoms of the people. With North Korea now clearly in a state of limbo going through yet another round of hereditary succession of power, the third of its kind, it is perhaps time now to consider revisiting, for its application to North Korea, the ‘crusade’ that U.S. President Ronald Reagan mobilized against Poland in 1980s that led to the liberation of Poland from the yoke of Communist tyranny and set the stage for the collapse of Communism that ensued in East European countries in a chain reaction.

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