I often think about the word “human rights.” I was born and raised in North Korea, so North Korea is like a root that can never be erased from who I am. For that reason, “North Korean human rights” is not some distant issue to me, like a debate over the climate crisis. I lived at the very bottom, through a life of terrible hardship, and the stories of those who remain there are still, in a sense, my own story.
And yet, a subject that should come so naturally to me becomes distorted and politically colored the moment it enters public discourse in South Korea. Some people become evasive. Others change the subject. What should be a universal human rights issue has become a minority discourse. “North Korean human rights” has disappeared from the everyday language of South Korean civil society. More precisely, it has not disappeared. It has been isolated.
It would be dishonest to explain this simply by saying that people are no longer interested. Public interest naturally rises and falls. But declining interest is one thing; the isolation of an entire issue from everyday public discourse is something else. This must be understood as a structural problem: a structural outcome that has developed regardless of whether anyone deliberately intended it.
This essay examines how North Korean human rights became a minority discourse isolated from South Korean civil society.
The period when North Korean human rights hardened into a marker of political affiliation in South Korea roughly spans the late 2000s and early 2010s. Under the Sunshine Policy of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations, officially placing North Korean human rights on the government agenda was itself politically burdensome. As a reaction, the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations actively employed the issue as leverage for putting pressure on North Korea.
Under the Moon Jae-in administration, North Korean human rights was once again pushed to the margins, overshadowed by the larger policy framework of the Korean Peninsula peace process. Under the Yoon Suk Yeol administration, it became a more aggressively promoted issue than under any previous conservative government. Now, under the Lee Jae-myung administration, it has again fallen down the list of government priorities under the broader discourse of peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula.
As the fate of the issue reversed each time political power changed hands, a situation emerged in which anyone who spoke about North Korean human rights was automatically classified as belonging to one political camp or another. An issue that should have been universal became a marker of partisan identity.
This politicization worked in two directions at once. On the one hand, conservatives claimed the issue as a political asset that could justify a hard-line policy toward North Korea and used it to criticize progressive approaches to inter-Korean relations. On the other hand, progressives found that visibly distancing themselves from the issue was a politically “efficient” way to preserve an engagement-oriented approach toward North Korea, leaving them unable to place it formally on the agenda. No one ever explicitly decided that North Korean human rights should become a partisan issue.
But that was the result.
The North Korean Human Rights Foundation, whose establishment was mandated under the North Korean Human Rights Act passed with bipartisan support in 2016, has still not been launched a decade later. The two major political camps have remained deadlocked because of their respective political calculations. The fact that a law can exist for nearly a decade without the institution it mandates demonstrates how North Korean human rights has become a dependent variable of political calculation. The issue is elevated or diminished depending on whether it serves as useful leverage for each side’s North Korea policy. This is how North Korean human rights operates structurally within South Korea’s political context.
One point should be made clear. It would be dishonest to place responsibility for this politicization entirely on one side. Conservatives had rational reasons for claiming the issue, just as progressives had rational reasons for avoiding it. The problem is that the combined result of those individual rationalities was irrational. What we need to diagnose is not who is at fault, but the structural pathology that produced this irrational outcome.
Looking at the resource structure of the North Korean human rights movement reveals another striking fact. A substantial share of the funding for major North Korean human rights organizations operating in South Korea comes from foundations financed by the U.S. government or Congress, along with some private-sector sources. In other words, most of the resources needed to sustain the North Korean human rights movement do not come from within South Korea.
There is little value in simply criticizing this. What matters is recognizing that the source of resources also shapes the form an issue takes.
Where resources come from influences the language in which an issue is articulated, the audience it addresses, and the political context it comes to inhabit. Organizations sustained by overseas funding naturally frame their agendas in ways compatible with the political grammar of those funding sources. As a result, North Korean human rights in South Korea has developed a different language, a different audience, and a different political grammar from other human rights issues within South Korean civil society. The same word, “human rights,” is being used, but it operates within a different network of meanings.
As described earlier, North Korean human rights has come to be perceived as representing the voice of a particular political camp, or at least as something consumed within that political context. This was probably never the intended outcome of the organizations involved. Because sufficient resources for North Korean human rights advocacy never developed within South Korean civil society itself, organizations had to go where resources were available.
But as these choices accumulated, North Korean human rights gradually found itself outside the flow of resources within South Korean civil society. The separation of resources produced an absence of communication and solidarity, which eventually became a separation of language itself. We may all speak in the name of the same universal human rights, yet our words are interpreted through different political frameworks, separating and isolating us from one another.
Since North Koreans began escaping the country in significant numbers during the Arduous March of the mid-1990s, the way South Korean media has covered North Korean human rights over the past three decades has been remarkably uniform. It has consisted overwhelmingly of narratives exposing atrocities and recounting testimony about human rights abuses. A North Korean escapee reproduces their most painful memories in front of a camera; the viewer is briefly shaken by that suffering; then the viewer forgets.
Such narratives mobilize powerful emotions, and that alone can make a meaningful contribution to public awareness. But their emotional intensity also encourages rapid consumption followed by rapid forgetting. The media’s “North Korean defector story” has become a cultural industry built around the consumption of suffering.
The problem is that the same narrative is repeated endlessly: the same stories, the same tone, the same framing, even the same people. Sometimes new, more shocking, more bizarre, or more dramatically compelling elements are added to sustain the audience’s interest. As a result, painful experiences can themselves be reduced to stories that audiences begin to doubt.
There have, in fact, been false or exaggerated testimonies, while ordinary South Korean viewers generally lack the background knowledge or information necessary to distinguish them from reliable accounts. It is not uncommon for other people from North Korea to be the only ones shaking their heads at what they hear.
Meanwhile, the audience has become fatigued. The essence of this fatigue is not necessarily indifference but a form of self-defense. An audience repeatedly asked to undergo intense emotional mobilization eventually begins to distance itself from the issue in order to protect itself from that demand. It resembles the psychological defense mechanism through which people turn away from the horrors of war. This is another reason North Korean human rights has disappeared from everyday language.
There is a deeper problem. Within an industry where narratives of suffering are consumed as cultural entertainment, people from North Korea remain permanently confined to the role of “witness.”
They are not “speakers” who talk about their daily lives, their ideas, or their futures. They are “witnesses” expected to repeatedly reproduce their painful pasts. This position is sustainable neither for those who speak nor for those who listen. The moment an audience begins to think, “That experience belongs to a world completely different from mine,” the distance between witness and listener grows even wider.
We need a different grammar. Changing the grammar of the narrative may be the first step toward changing the fate of North Korean human rights as an issue.
The fourth factor is often overlooked, yet it may be the most fundamental: the paradox that the more people from North Korea speak in their own voices, the more precarious their personal safety and social position can become.
This paradox operates in several ways. Media exposure can create risks for family members who remain in North Korea. There is also social stigma within South Korean society. And then there is the most subtle but perhaps most powerful danger: the complexity of the speaker can be erased, reducing the individual to the position of a particular political camp.
When someone from North Korea speaks about North Korean human rights, their words are reinterpreted and mobilized within a partisan political grammar. The reality is that concealing one’s background as a North Korean defector can make settling into ordinary life in South Korea considerably easier.
As a result, many people from North Korea choose not to speak. They are particularly reluctant to express political opinions. This silence has been produced by a South Korean social structure afflicted by political binary thinking. People have learned that keeping quiet offers a better chance of living an ordinary life.
Here we encounter another paradox. For North Korean human rights to reconnect with South Korean civil society, people from North Korea themselves need to speak in a diversity of voices. Yet when the conditions necessary for them to speak freely do not exist, speaking itself becomes uncomfortable and risky.
This is one reason there are more representatives speaking on their behalf than people speaking for themselves. There is a small number of North Korean human rights activists from North Korea who are highly visible through activities such as launching balloons into North Korea, giving testimony, or speaking at churches. But many of the major actors in the North Korean human rights movement are not themselves from North Korea.
As Gayatri Spivak has pointed out, representation by those who are not themselves members of the affected group cannot fully reproduce the historical experience and complexity of those they seek to represent.
The four layers examined above are neither parallel nor independent. They form a cycle in which each reinforces the others.
The political polarization of North Korean human rights pushed the structure of resources toward one side. That skewed resource structure reproduced a narrow and repetitive media rhetoric. The resulting media frame increased the risks faced by people from North Korea who chose to speak. Those greater risks, in turn, prevented different voices from emerging, further entrenching the political polarization of the issue.
This is the mechanism through which North Korean human rights has become isolated as a minority discourse.
The reason for laying out this diagnosis at such length is not to blame anyone. Quite the opposite. If there is one thing that is easy in this world, it is probably assigning blame. But we already know that blame often prevents us from seeing structural problems and can leave those problems even more deeply neglected.
Understanding how North Korean human rights operates within South Korean society—why the language of universal human rights became associated with a particular political camp, and why it lost its potential for solidarity by becoming the discourse of a relatively small activist community—is a meaningful step toward building a sustainable North Korean human rights movement.
Posted by Freewhale98