WASHINGTON– China and Russia both facilitate human rights violations in North Korea by evading international sanctions, forcing refugees back to North Korea and enabling human trafficking across the Chinese border, experts said at a Thursday webinar.
“These two great powers, China and Russia, in broad daylight, supporting these egregious human rights violations inevitably has implications for international order,” said Katrin Fraser Katz, a fellow and Korea expert from the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “If it’s not responded to, the question arises, ‘what can these actors get away with on the global stage?’”
She referenced a recent report from last month by the George W. Bush Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies that said China and Russia are complicit in these human rights violations in several ways, including political support for North Korea’s regime, noncompliance with international sanctions and attempting to block U.N. initiatives to advance human rights in North Korea.
This new report builds off of a 2014 U.N. report on human rights violations in North Korea. Those violations followed nine specific areas, including crimes against humanity, discrimination and prison camp detention.
The White House has been closely following how North Korea has been providing weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine. According to last month’s report, the arms trade between North Korea and Russia suggests the need for “ongoing close attention, as it has the potential to further embolden North Korea in its weapons development and human rights violations.”
During the panel, Katz said that when it comes to paving a way forward with this issue, security and human rights appear to be “two sides of the same coin.”
“Progress on the security front can’t happen as long as North Korea’s repression of its people remains where it currently is,” Katz said. “That’s both because North Korea relies on forced labor to get hard currency to fund its weapons program.”
But progress on this issue is at a standstill. “China and Russia want to enable North Korea because they want to be in a world where they can do these kinds of things to their own people with impunity,” Katz said. “Ultimately, the readers of this report, I hope, will look at this and reflect. These are great powers wanting to create a world in which these types of violations can go unaddressed.”
Katz added, “We have to ask, ‘what kind of world do we want to live in?”