Human Rights

The Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI), with the generous support of the Korea Foundation, organized six “Vision Group” roundtable conversations with leading American scholars and commentators to discuss the…

KEI’s 2020 Report on American Attitudes Toward the Korean Peninsula focuses on U.S. views on relations with South Korea, U.S. awareness of South Korean brands and cultural products, and views…

The states of Southeast Asia are on the front lines of competition not only in regard to the balance of military and political power, as analyzed in Section I, but…

Although coercion is a key element in the governing strategy of the North Korean party-state, the authorities in Pyongyang do not hold political power at the barrel of a gun…

The UN Security Council discussed North Korea’s human rights abuses in a closed session on Friday December 11.  Because of the Covid pandemic, it was a virtual (online) meeting rather than an in-person session, and because of Chinese and Russian objections, it was a closed session without the presence of news media to report on…

In the next few days, the United Nations General Assembly will approve a resolution on “The Situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”  The text of the 11 page resolution reviews the human rights abuses that the UN Commission of Inquiry on North Korea’s human rights documented (2013-2014), as well as…

The agreement between Korea and Japan on the issue of comfort women, announced in 2015, seemed like an amazing breakthrough on a sensitive topic in the bilateral relationship. But in the five years since then, the agreement has largely fallen apart, and other disagreements over the legacy of Japanese control of the Korean Peninsula have…

By Stephan Haggard Humanitarian disasters in closed, authoritarian regimes pose particular challenges to the international community. Government actions can exacerbate or even create crises; this was certainly true of the great famine of the early 1990s. Yet the victims of the regime’s choices are innocents, including overstretched but dedicated doctors and health care workers. If…