By Yi Whan-woo
South Korea and the United States will host a conference on Feb. 17 in Washington D.C. to commemorate of the first anniversary of U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) report on North Korea’s state-perpetrated human rights violations.
Seoul’s Yonsei Center for Human Liberty will organize the conference along with three other think tanks and human rights institutions in the U.S. They are the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the George W. Bush Institute.
The one-day event will take place at CSIS headquarters under the theme, “North Korean Human Rights: The Road Ahead.”
The meeting will draw the world’s policymakers and opinion leaders to discuss Pyongyang’s dire human rights record. They will include Michael Kirby, an Australian who led the COI report released on Feb. 17, 2014.
The U.N. report accused North Korea of running political prison camps where up to 120,000 people are thought to be detained. Based on the report, the U.N. General Assembly in December passed a resolution that requests the U.N. Security Council to refer North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity.
Kirby will join Kim Moon-soo, the chairman of the ruling Saenuri Party’s Political Reform Committee. Kim, a former Gyeonggi Province governor, was South Korea’s first lawmaker to propose a bill in 2005 calling for a response to North Korea’s human rights abuses.
Other participants include Robert King, the U.S. State Department special envoy for North Korean human rights issues; and Kurt Campbell, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs and incumbent president and CEO of The Asia Group.
The meeting comes in the wake of Pyongyang’s demand to annul the U.N. General Assembly’s resolution. North Korea has repeatedly claimed the COI report and subsequent U.N. resolution against the repressive regime used “false” accounts of Shin Dong-hyuk, who had escaped from North Korean prison.
Shin admitted in January that there are inaccuracies in a best-selling book, “Escape from Camp 14.” Published in 2012, it was written by American journalist Blaine Harden based on Shin’s account about life in the regime’s gulags. Harden also will attend the conference in the U.S. capital on Feb.17.