Another US funding cut threatens human rights in North Korea - and hands more power to a dictator

This week, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea issued an appeal to the international community. She expressed concern about the future of civil society work on North Korean human rights.

The cause for alarm is a sudden freeze on the funds of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)- a US nongovernmental organisation.

One major beneficiary of funds from the NED are groups documenting and helping to stop human rights abuses in North Korea.

The funding halt threatens to damage further the lives of people living under one of the world’s most egregious authoritarian regimes.

What is the NED?

The NED is a US institution with a long history in its foreign policy, described as a “bastion of Republican internationalism”. Established by an act of Congress, it was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.

With bipartisan support, the NED is squarely based on core Republican values of spreading democracy through the world. It supports the work of nongovernmental organisations in more than 100 countries every year.

While it is unclear why Elon Musk, in his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, has suddenly taken aim at this institution, the consequences of cutting off funding overnight are easy to see.

One result is the likely end of decades-long work on North Korean human rights.

How this affects North Korea

One of the groups hit hard by this funding freeze is the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. The original single-issue North Korean human rights organisation, it’s now planning to shut its doors.

Without NED funding, it says it cannot cover its running costs, such as paying the rent or staff salaries.

It also can’t continue its important work investigating and documenting human rights abuses suffered by North Korean people.

The Citizens’ Alliance is just one of many groups, most of which are based in South Korea, that rely on the NED for their work.

The political environment in South Korea is uncertain and precarious for North Korean human rights activists. Despite efforts to diversify funding sources over many decades, there are few other options.

I have studied this question in-depth and over two decades. It’s a problem that cannot be overcome overnight, or even in the medium term, as it’s so deeply embedded, both politically and socially.

In the absence of funding opportunities in South Korea, Seoul-based groups must look abroad.

Yet many of the international support schemes available exist to fund in-country democratisation and human rights efforts.

The authoritarian regime in North Korea is so complete that no active, open civil society efforts can safely take place. The movement relies entirely on transnational activism and so doesn’t neatly fit into existing funding schemes.

On top of this, the funding freeze comes at a particularly bad time, with South Korea in a state of political turmoil. In the wake of the President Yoon Suk-yeol’s impeachment following his declaration of martial law, it is unclear what the future of the limited number of existing initiatives will be.

Putting North Korea in the spotlight

For a long time, the plight of those suffering human rights abuses inside the secretive country was not well known to the outside world.

For decades, civil society groups built coalitions, gathered information, wrote reports, compiled databases, held public awareness-raising events, and lobbied politicians at all different levels. They then succeeded in bringing about the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry into North Korean Human Rights.

This inquiry, chaired by Australia’s Michael Kirby, has been the definitive document on North Korean human rights for more than ten years.

Its findings of gross violations of human rights inside the country have formed the evidentiary basis for international action on North Korean human rights. Examples of the report’s findings include:

• the use of political prison camps, torture, executions and other sorts of arbitrary detention to suppress real or perceived political dissent

• an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion and association

• the use of access to food as a means of control over the population.

Non-profit North Korean human rights groups remain at the centre of this work. Having succeeded in putting the issue squarely on the international agenda, they continue to press for greater attention on the human rights situation from the international community.

The groups relying on NED funding do a wide range of work. They support North Koreans living in South Korea and elsewhere abroad. Some provide support to formally record human rights abuses, helping build a robust database of testimony from survivors.

Others back in-country accounts from underground North Korean journalists, and more still do myriad other advocacy, support and accountability work.

But now this work could all end more suddenly than anyone could have expected.

More power to a dictator

The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights has paused all but its most urgent programs and launched an appeal for donations. Executive Director Hannah Song has described the situation as a crisis of “a massive and sudden cut to funding that threatens the crucial work of those on the frontlines”.

Sokeel Park, the leader of another nongovernmental group working in this space, described it as “by far the biggest crisis facing NGOs working on this issue since the start of the movement in the 1990s”.

This is no exaggeration. The North Korean human rights movement has had an outsized effect on the international community’s awareness and understanding of how the North Korean government maintains order and represses dissent.

So who wins out of this? North Korea’s Supreme Leader and dictator, Kim Jong-un.

Back in 2018, US President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address centred on the human rights violations suffered by the North Korean people at the hands of the authoritarian regime. Trump declared:

we need only look at the depraved character of the North Korean regime to understand the nature of the nuclear threat it could pose.

Now, by effectively silencing the government’s most vocal critics, the Trump administration appears to be giving breathing room to one of the world’s most atrocious authoritarian regimes.