Preparing for transitional justice in North Korea

ABSTRACT

The further isolation of North Korea in response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a timely reminder that when it comes to the question of how to bring about change with relation to North Korea, a combination of creative and differentiated approaches are needed. In this piece, we argue that preparations for a just future transition on the Korean peninsula must start now. This commentary considers the possibilities for Australia to support just transition, in whatever form it may take, through immediate action not focused on bilateral or state-centric relations, but instead through other spaces in a broadly defined civil society. Effective Australian support for transitional justice and overall wellbeing of North Koreans must overcome structural barriers to opportunity for North Koreans within Australia, as well as barriers of overly securitised paradigms.

KEYWORDS:

• North Korea
• transitional justice
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As of October 2021, only the following countries retained embassies in North Korea: China, Cuba, Egypt, Laos, Mongolia, Palestine, Russia, Syria and Vietnam (O’Carroll 2021b). In addition to embassy staff, foreigners living for extended periods in North Korea have notably included humanitarian workers. While the numbers of foreign staff were relatively small compared to other contexts – for example, the World Food Programme in 2019 employed 13 international staff and the UN Development Programme had 6 expatriate workers (Nichols 2019) – humanitarians working for resident UN agencies and NGOs, as well as those coming into the country on a regular basis for non-resident work, have provided a valuable presence and two-way flow of information since international humanitarian aid programming began in 1995.

2 At the time of publication, the DPRK’s most recent missile test was a hypersonic missile test on 13 January 2022.

3 A high proportion of North Koreans living outside North Korea report having experienced harm since many are already disaffected from the regime, having left the country and settled elsewhere. In this way, the population surveyed is what Song and Denney (2019, 453) describe as a self-selecting sample of North Koreans with a particular experience of life under authoritarian rule.

4 See for example: (Sperfeldt and Oeung 2019; Kent 2011; Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent 2016).

5 https://hanvoice.ca/work/refugees

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by a grant from the Academy of Korean Studies. The authors particularly thank the participants of two grant-funded workshops held in 2021 for their valuable insights.

Notes on contributors

Nazanin Zadeh-Cummings

Dr Nazanin Zadeh-Cummings is a Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies in the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership at Deakin University. Nazanin received her PhD from the City University of Hong Kong in 2019. Her thesis focused on humanitarian non-governmental organisations working in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). Nazanin's research interests include disaster management, humanitarian aid, humanitarian access, human rights, civil society, and the DPRK.

Sarah Son

Dr Sarah Son is a Lecturer in Korean Studies in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her current research involves methods of monitoring and recording human rights abuses in North Korea through interviews with North Korean escapees to South Korea. Alongside this work, she is investigating the potential use of the data gathered on human rights abuses in current and future efforts to pursue accountability for violations.

Danielle Chubb

Dr Danielle Chubb is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University and a founding member of the POLIS group in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. Her research interests include the interplay of human rights, peace and security norms (particularly on the Korean peninsula), the role that transnational activists play in shaping normative and policy agendas and creating change, and Australian foreign policy and public opinion.