Crimes Against Humanity: Unpacking The North Korean Human Rights Article Analysis

In “Crimes Against Humanity: unpacking the North Korean human rights debate”, published online on Critical Asian Studies on 19 February 2014, Hazel Smith provides a clear overview of the North Korean human rights discourse’s perspectives. Particularly, the author attempted to shine a light on the discriminatory use of the statistical indicators that UN humanitarian and development agencies have been issuing since the mid-1990s on North Korea. According to Smith, inconsistency and misinterpretation are mostly due to a securitization perspective through which knowledge about DPRK is filtered, rather than to a mere conscious bias (Smith, 2014, 127).
Introducing the main features that label a research approach as scientific, Smith argues that
Looking at the 2011 FAO/WFP/UNICEF report, she contends that food insecurity is above all attributable to climate events, the spread of diseases in cattle, and the commercial import capacity of the country (Smith 2014, 136). Particularly, Smith considers the latter to be caused by the high international food and fuel price, the political fallout with ROK, and the devaluation of the DPRK currency (Smith 2014, 136). Furthermore, inquiring into UNHRC 2013 reports Smith figured out that North Korean severe malnutrition rate was lower than those of many South Asian countries, but worse compared to the East Asia and the Pacific as a whole’s average(Smith, 2014, 137). Similarly, North Korean maternal mortality rate, although alarming, is far from being the worst in the
Actually, although their research did not achieve sufficient evidential support, agencies judged the food rationing system as based on occupation, gender, and age discrimination, claiming that political loyalty to the government is pivotal in designing such hierarchy (Smith 2014, 138). Notwithstanding Smith does not reject this view, however, she sates that “the exercise of food rights is as much linked to entrepreneurial skills as to position in a political hierarchy” (Smith 2014, 138). Accordingly, she questions to what extent North Korean social structure varies from those of any other country. Particularly, she contends that it is difficult to label DPRK as an abuser of the rights to food unless the government of India and Indonesia are charged with the same crime (Smith 2014, 139). Moreover, she deems an economic and food crisis of long duration to be the leading cause of children starvation in North Korea(Smith 2014,