Human rights experts in Washington are divided over whether the U.S. withdrawal from a United Nations body on human rights will hurt North Korea’s already poor human rights situation.
Last Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order pulling the U.S. out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, or UNHRC, reintroducing the stance he held during his previous term.
The executive order said that the UNHRC has “protected human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny,” adding that the council deserves “renewed scrutiny.”
The decision was announced ahead of Trump’s recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited Washington for the first time since Trump’s second inauguration.
Since his first term, President Trump has been disapproving of the activities of the U.N. human rights body. In June 2018, the Trump administration criticized the UNHRC for its “bias against Israel,” stressing the council that year passed resolutions against Israel more than those passed against North Korea, Iran and Syria combined.
Negative impact
Robert King, who served as the U.S. special envoy for North Korea’s human rights under the Obama administration, said that the U.S. decision to withdraw from the U.N. Human Rights Council could negatively undermine international efforts to improve human rights conditions in the North.
“It will have a negative impact. The U.N. Human Rights Council has been a very effective body in terms of calling attention to North Korea’s serious human rights abuses,” King told VOA Korean on the phone last week. “And the fact that the United States will not be an active participant is again a very unfortunate situation.”
Roberta Cohen, former deputy assistant secretary of state for human rights, said leaving the UNHRC is “a short-sighted decision.”
Cohen, who also served as senior adviser to the U.S. Delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and the General Assembly, said it is important that the U.S. be seated at the council with a vote and be active in mobilizing support for any new initiatives.
“If the reforms are needed and they are, the U.S. should be involved heavily,” Cohen told VOA Korean by phone last week. “Walking away cedes the floor to your opponents.”
Cohen highlighted that the council was where the Commission of Inquiry on the Human Rights in North Korea, or COI, was conceived. The COI is widely considered to be the first systematic and thorough documentation of Pyongyang’s violations of human rights.
She added that an update of the COI is to be presented in September for the first time in more than a decade, saying that Washington needs to be part of the process when the report is introduced.
However, others question the role of the Human Rights Council in making a real impact on improving North Korea’s human rights conditions.
“The Human Rights Council has become a very tragic farce. It was supposed to promote and protect human rights around the world but instead it coddles dictatorships and gives them legitimacy by including them as members of the council,” said Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation and a longtime North Korea human rights activist. “We’re not addressing the horrific things that are happening to the North Korean refugees in China that are being shot and executed when they’re returned.”
‘Illegitimate’ members
Human rights experts have long criticized Beijing for failing to afford protection to North Korean refugees and forcefully repatriating them to North Korea.
David Maxwell, vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy in Washington, said North Korean human rights issues need to be separated from how Trump wants to deal with the United Nations.
“This is about the Trump administration’s views toward U.N. organizations and how they are being misused by countries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea,” Maxwell told VOA Korean on Monday via email. “When these organizations are coerced by members of the so-called axis of upheaval, they are not able to support the people who are suffering true human rights abuses.”
Meanwhile, Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation chair at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies in Washington, said the U.S. has other tools to address the North Korean human rights issue.
“Pulling out of the UNHRC won’t make much of a difference practically speaking,” Yeo told VOA Korean via email last week. “The U.S. has other means and platforms to raise North Korean human rights objections, including its own State Department human rights reports.”
The U.S. rejoined the UNHRC shortly after the inauguration of Joe Biden as president in 2021, but the Biden administration decided not to seek a second term as a board member of the council when the three-year membership was to expire at the end of 2024.
The move was made amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, which launched a surprise attack on the former a year prior. The State Department explained at the time that the U.S. decided not to pursue a second term at the council “because we are engaged with our allies about the best way to move forward.”
Every March or April, the State Department releases the annual Human Rights Reports, which cover the human rights situations around the world. The document last year said there were credible reports of unlawful killing, enforced disappearances and torture taking place in North Korea.