The Marmot’s Hole

DLP members protest NK Human Rights Act in front of U.S. Embassy on Thursday/ OhMyNews

On Thursday, Uri Party Chairman Lee Bu-young expressed “grave concern” at the passing of the NK Human Rights Act. Courtesy the Korea Times:

“I am looking at the issue with grave concern because it could negatively affect inter-Korean relations and the six-way talks,” Lee told reporters. “It’s a foregone conclusion that the situation surrounding the Korean peninsula will be aggravated further.”

The Uri Party is continuing the legacy of former President Kim Dae-jung’s “sunshine” policy of engaging North Korea through dialogue.

“As a politician who must pay attention to all aspects of cross-border relations, I can’t but wonder why the Senate passed it at this juncture,” Lee said.

While I happened to agree with Lee for the most part, as I explained in my earlier post on this subject, with the Foreign and Unification ministers blaming civic groups helping defectors for causing problems and Seoul sitting out U.N. votes on N. Korea’s human rights situation, he shouldn’t wonder too hard why the bill was passed at this particular juncture.

To prevent the act from becoming law, Rep. Chung Bong-ju of the governing party suggested the government should employ every possible means to press the U.S. president to use its veto.

Chung, formerly a pro-democracy activist [emphasis mine] before winning a seat in the April elections, delivered a statement signed by 26 fellow lawmakers to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in September to ask the Senate to consider dropping the bill.

Uri Party floor leader Cheon Jeong-bae, who is currently visiting the United States, said:

As human rights issues are a universal value, there could be no disagreement between the U.S. and S. Korea, and we evaluate [highly] the interest taken by the American people in N. Korean human rights. It’s only that we have to solve issues related to N. Korea within a larger framework.

Ah, as a conservative, it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling to hear politicians with such a profound appreciation for realpolitik. My only question is whether Cheon and his Uri Party buddies held the same understanding of the “big picture” when U.S. politicians were claiming that S. Korean human rights issues had to be resolved within the greater framework of the Cold War. Probably not.

It should come as no surprise that in a report to the National Assembly’s judiciary committee, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) has called into question the “purity” of the NK Human Rights Act. The committee said that when one considers the bill’s content and background behind the pushing of the act, controversy would surround the intention of the bill. The committee pointed out that the Hudson Institute, which played an active role in enacting the NK Human Rights Act, said that through human rights, the U.S. had to make N. Korea collapse like the former Soviet Union.

Of course, this is the very same organization that sent its head before the National Assembly in April 2003, where he refused to say whether human rights abuses were worse in N. Korea than they were in S. Korea, citing a lack of hard data. This was immediately after it had issued a statement of concern on human rights abuses by U.S. troops following the invasion of Iraq, which it apparently had plenty of hard data on, fortunately enough.

On the other hand, the opposition Grand National Party has been welcoming the passing of the bill, as could be expected.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) handed a letter to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul on Thursday that strongly criticized the NK Human Rights Act, calling it a “law to make N. Korea collapse” and “building a justification to invade N. Korea.” Several DLP members and friends held a small protest in front of the embassy (a photo of which I affixed to the top of this post), calling for the bill to be withdrawn. Aside from the usual talk of how the law was a threat to peace in the region and a barrier to intra-Korean reconciliation, the DLP claimed that the bill represented “intervention in South Korea’s internal affairs” by curbing defectors’ possession of ROK citizenship so that they could apply for asylum or refugee status in the United States.” Tony at Oriental Redneck explained why this was a silly argument in his post to which I linked in my post immediately prior to this one. Let me just add that if anyone is blocking N. Koreans from enjoying their rights as citizens of the Republic of Korea, it’s not the U.S. Congress, but Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon and Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, both of whom seem more intent on preventing defectors from claiming ROK citizenship than with helping them claim the rights than come with said citizenship. Heck, even Uri Party spokesman Im Jong-seok worried today that the bill would increase the number of defection from N. Korea. It’s hard to bitch to the U.S. that defectors are ROK citizens when you spend the rest of your time hoping that the defectors themselves remain unaware of this fact.