Last spring two North Korean defectors visited Stanford University from Seoul to share their experiences in the North. Hosted by Stanford's Korean Student Association, the event was held to increase awareness of North Korean human rights issues in the Stanford intellectual community. In fact, the Association hosts "North Korean Human Rights Night" every year. Stanford is not alone in this; many other leading American universities across the country, often also led by Korean American students, convene similar gatherings.

In the summer of 2012, Silicon Valley IT giant Google, a Stanford progeny and neighbor, hosted a conference on how technology can be used to disrupt illicit global networks, such as trafficking in human beings, human organs, and weapons. Ten North Korean defectors, ranging from former elite party members to forgotten orphans, flew in from Seoul to participate. They shared their extraordinary stories of survival amid excruciatingly painful quests for freedom.

Growing pressure on Pyongyang

These two stories are not isolated episodes. They reflect a recent trend of the international community paying dramatically more attention to North Korean human rights issues. Most notably, last month the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to put North Korean human rights violations on the U.N. Security Council's agenda, despite objections from China and Russia. International pressure has been intensifying on Pyongyang since the release last year of a U.N. report documenting a network of political prisons in the North and atrocities that include murder, enslavement, torture, rape and forced abortions.

While concerns about North Korean human rights are longstanding at the U.N., this was the first time the U.N. Security Council ever debated the isolated country's human rights situation. In the past the international community focused primarily on curbing North Korea's nuclear programs. Now human rights in North Korea have become a matter rivaling the nuclear issue in seriousness and global attention. Its importance appears likely to continue to grow in the coming years.

That the human rights situation in North Korea is appalling was never a secret. Defectors have produced some searing accounts of life in the North Korean gulag. Why then did the international community largely ignore it until recently?

Partly this was a product of the priority given to security issues. But it also has to do with the closed nature of the regime and Cold War dynamics that made many people in the international community doubt that the situation could be as bad as some asserted. Pyongyang made it virtually impossible for foreign journalists to report out of the country, much less obtain video that could dramatize the situation of the ordinary people of North Korea for an international audience.

Moreover, some Western observers suspected that those focusing on North Korea's human rights situation were trying to demonize the regime for political and strategic purposes. Others, such as China and Russia, stayed away from supporting international criticism of North Korea's human rights situation, apparently for fear of opening up their own human rights situation to heightened international scrutiny. In any event, with few practical means to address the North Korean human rights situation, the international community paid little heed to the problem until the end of the cold war.

Unspeakable atrocities

Then, the great famine in North Korea in the mid-1990s led to many more North Koreans leaving their country and seeking temporary relief in China. More than ever they traveled on to the South and brought their life stories with them. One consequence has been an enormous increase in the amount of information available about circumstances inside North Korea, not least due to the flow of information into the country and the use of cell phones and other technology to get reports out. Along with changing international norms about human rights, this contributed to a dramatic growth during the past decade in the number of people, organizations and states throughout the world actively focusing on human rights in North Korea. In South Korea alone, there are many NGOs, often led by North Korean refugees, that work on North Korean human rights issues.

In a logical conclusion to these developments, a special United Nations Commission of Inquiry in February 2014 published a report detailing what it called "unspeakable atrocities" in North Korea. The head of the inquiry sent a letter to Kim Jong Un, warning, in effect, that Kim himself might be brought before the International Criminal Court. While the U.N. Security Council has not yet taken concrete action, the fact that it placed North Korea's human rights record on its agenda means that, theoretically at least, it can now at any point take the next step of referring these crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court.

How, then, should we deal with the human rights situation in North Korea? While it is not difficult to condemn the current condition on moral and ethical grounds, it is much more challenging to adequately address it in practical terms, especially when the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reacts extremely negatively on such condemnation and uses it as a reason for not engaging on this issue.

For instance, the North Korean human rights situation remains one of the most divisive issues between conservatives and progressives in South Korea. South Korean conservatives advocate a very active program of publicizing and condemning North Korea's human rights situation. Many support steps such as taking the matter before the International Court of Justice with the aim of charging North Korea's leaders with crimes against humanity. Conservatives argue not only that this is the morally correct approach but also that it would put increased pressure on the regime to reform, if not contribute to its collapse.

South Korean progressives, on the other hand, while acknowledging the seriousness of the situation, are adamant that focusing on it will not serve to improve the situation. Instead, they say, by making the regime feel even less secure, it would actually worsen the human rights situation in North Korea as well as hurt efforts to improve inter-Korean relations. Progressives therefore argue South Korea should instead focus for the time being on state-to-state dialogue while providing aid to the North. This would reassure Pyongyang, they say, and eventually contribute to its taking its own reform measures, including improving the human rights situation.

As a result of these very different views, the Republic of Korea has adopted significantly different policies depending on whether a progressive or a conservative leader occupies the Blue House. When progressives Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun were president, the ROK often abstained on votes in UN bodies addressing North Korea's human rights situation. In contrast, conservative governments voted in favor of international criticism of North Korea's human rights situation and sometimes took the lead in raising the issue.

A coordinated effort

Meanwhile, South Korea's National Assembly has for years been unable to pass a North Korean human rights bill at all. Progressives favor "human rights" legislation that deals primarily with providing humanitarian aid to the North, consistent with their perspective on the problem's roots, while conservatives have drafted a bill that focuses on human rights along the lines of the United States' North Korea Human Rights Act, first passed in 2004.

For its part, the U.S. itself became focused on human rights only about a generation ago. It was not until the administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) that the U.S. embraced an activist policy placing international human rights near the top of its foreign agenda. Before then, the U.S. fiercely criticized communist states, but mostly because of the nature of their regimes rather than their human rights practices per se.

Today democratic governments throughout the world routinely criticize aspects of the human rights situations even in friendly and allied countries, not just in those of adversaries. Actions on behalf of human rights that in earlier decades would have been deemed unacceptable "interference in domestic affairs" now enjoy international legitimacy and broad support. Concepts such as the "responsibility to protect (R2P)," which many Japanese have promoted, assert that national sovereignty is not absolute and that the international community must intervene to stop situations where the regime is unable to protect its people.

While concern is well-taken that a focus on the North Korean human rights situation would burden any engagement effort with Pyongyang and, moreover, would not improve the lives of the people of North Korea in the short- to mid-term, we cannot ignore the human rights situation. Any policy toward the North must take into account that the North Korean human rights issue has developed dramatically in recent years.

For South Korea, this requires a principled but nuanced approach. It has long been the primary center for research on North Korean human rights, with the Korea Institute for National Unification producing its annual White Paper since 1996, but it needs to establish a bipartisan body to develop programs to effectively address those areas most in need. It should also support all important and accurate criticism of North Korea's human rights situation at the United Nations and other international organizations.

However, South Korea may not take the lead in addressing North Korea's human rights abuses, while increasing the humanitarian provision of nutritional assistance and public health services in North Korea without linkage to the nuclear issue. Such an approach would deprive North Korea of the argument that South Korea is not actually concerned about human rights but is using the issue as a weapon against Pyongyang.

Like other aspects of North Korea policy, the human rights problem is extremely troubling yet enormously difficult to address effectively. The international community must share its wisdom and its resources to develop and implement principled, pragmatic, long-term approaches to the challenges that Pyongyang presents, especially the human rights situation. Leaders of the international community as a whole but above all South Korea's neighbors should support and participate in such a coordinated effort. This is in fact an area in which Japan and South Korea can easily cooperate more.

Shin recently coauthored the policy report, "Tailored Engagement: Toward an Effective and Sustainable Inter-Korean Relations Policy," released at a hearing of the Korean National Assembly's special committee on inter-Korean relations. This Nikkei Asian Review article was originally carried on Jan. 20 and reposted with permission.