The budget of the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) to publish its annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea has dropped significantly. The institution, which is under the Prime Minister’s Office, has published the report every year since 1996 to raise awareness on North Korean human rights issues at home and abroad. The North Korean government repeatedly showed its discomfort with the content of the reports.
According to the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper on Wednesday, Rep. Ji Seong-ho, a North Korean defector elected as a South Korean lawmaker of the main opposition People Power Party, acquired the KINU’s budget for the white paper. The data showed that the budget for the report dropped significantly from 69.03 million won ($58,974) last year to 15.8 million won ($13,498) this year, a drop of nearly 77 percent.
The newspaper pointed out that the budget has been gradually reduced over the past 10 years. From 2011 to 2013, under the Lee Myung-bak administration, the annual budget was around 100 million won ($85,433). However, during the Park Geun-hye administration, the figure dropped to 84 million won ($71,764) in 2014 and 61 million won ($52,114) in 2016. Nonetheless, the drop from 2020 to 2021 is unprecedentedly large.
“The KINU has excluded publication of the annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea while establishing plans for their 2021 research projects,” the PPP’s public policy committee said. In order to publish the white paper in 2022, the KINU has to conduct research in 2021, but the committee argued that this was totally excluded from the yearly plans.
The budget for a certain year’s white paper is divided into budgets allocated for two years. For example, the 2021 white paper used the budget allocated in 2020 for research and the budget allocated in 2021 for publishing.
“Some 15 million won of the budget allocated this year was already spent to publish the 2021 white paper, which was published in July,” said Rep. Ji Seong-ho. “This means that they did not allocate any budget to conduct research to publish the 2022 report. After I found out about this issue, I contacted the institute and they replied by saying ‘they are not planning on publishing the 2022 report.’” Ji added that, “when considering previous cases, this is unprecedented.”
A diplomatic source, however, told the JoongAng Ilbo that “the number of defectors available for interviews has dropped due to COVID-19 and there is skepticism inside the KINU on why they have to publish the report every year even though there are not that many changes made each year.”
The newspaper cited another source familiar with the KINU as saying, “It is true that there were voices among researchers saying that we should stop publishing the report and postpone the publication date to later in the year or publish it biannually.”
Rep. Ji argued that “It is an attempt to incapacitate the White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, which is technically the only tool to raise awareness of the reality of the human rights violations in the North.”
The KINU explained that it is true that they considered publishing the report biannually but will continue to publish it annually. Regarding the drop in the budget, an official from the KINU said, “We can use other funds allocated to the institution to publish the report although they are not specifically allocated for its publication.” As the controversy grew, the KINU released another statement later in the day that said next year’s report will be published in December 2022. It added that the institution will continue to provide objective documents related to North Korean human rights issues through the report.
The KINU’s White Paper is considered to be one of the most expert and objective reports related to the ongoing human rights violations in North Korea. It has been published since 1996 for the purpose of informing people on the situation through a wide range of interviews with defectors. The KINU’s White Paper was also cited in many international organizations’ publications, including the United Nations’ 2014 Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
There are many issues introduced in the KINU’s reports, including political prison camps and abductees, which are topics that North Korea finds disturbing. Last year, one of North Korea’s propaganda outlets argued that “they published a provocative brochure by collecting excrement of defectors and they made up things that are not based on truth.”
The number of copies of the white paper printed every year has been decreasing as well. In 2018, they published a total of 2,500 copies, including both Korean and English versions, but this dropped to 2,000 in 2019 and 1,800 in 2020.
Meanwhile, after watching Afghanistan’s fall following the withdrawal of U.S. forces, more South Korean conservatives are calling to expand the country’s self-defense, including nuclear weapons.
Thae Yong-ho, a former senior North Korean diplomat and lawmaker from the PPP, wrote on his Facebook on August 18 that “the Afghanistan case gives us a lesson that we need to have our roadmap to develop nuclear weapons to be able to defend ourselves.” He said that “As soon as possible, we have to provide a timetable on developing our nuclear weapons to the United States and China and inform them that we have no option but to pursue this if we fail to achieve denuclearization of North Korea by 2027, or by the end of the next [South Korean] administration.” He said this will pressure the United States and China to become more active in denuclearizing North Korea.
“What came to my mind after watching the Afghanistan case and Kim Yo-jong’s threat calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces in South Korea is Kim Jong-un’s nuclear strategy in which the United States would abandon South Korea to save Los Angeles,” Thae argued.
When asked whether the withdrawal from Afghanistan could lead to the withdrawal from other countries such as South Korea during a press briefing on August 17, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that, “the President, as he has said repeatedly, has no intention of drawing down our forces from South Korea, or from Europe, where we have sustained true presences for a very long time, not in the middle of a civil war, but to deal with the potential of an external enemy, and to protect our ally against that external enemy.”
Sullivan added that it is a “fundamentally different kind of situation from the one we’re presented in Afghanistan.”
