CFR Daily News Brief 10/22 North Korea Frees U.S. Citizen

Daily News Brief October 22, 2014

Top of the Agenda

North Korea Frees U.S. Citizen

U.S. citizen Jeffrey Fowle was released from a North Korean prison (Yonhap) on Tuesday after being held for over six months on charges of promoting Christianity. Two other Americans are still detained for allegedly committing anti-state crimes. The move comes amid speculations surrounding Kim Jong-un's almost forty-day absence, debate at the UN (AP) on North Korea's human rights violations, and exchanges fire with South Korea along the border and in disputed waters. Nevertheless, North Korea is making a diplomatic push, including last week's high-level inter-Korean dialogue, the first of its kind in three years.

Analysis

"Our position has been very consistent and well-known. We totally rejected the resolution on human rights against my country offered by—sponsored by the European Union and Japan at the U.N. Human Rights Council and the United Nations General Assembly every year. We totally and categorically reject the contents of the report. None of such violations exist in my country, and in no way can they exist," said North Korean envoy to the UN Jang Il Hun at a CFR Meeting.

"North Korea subsequently released its own report in response, saying that it had 'the world's most advantageous human rights system.' Although the report was widely criticised as deceitful, the bar for North Korean transparency is so low that the fact that it is even engaging on the issue was considered progress," writes Anna Fifield in the Washington Post.

"North Korea has been far less forthcoming about its intentions. It remains to be seen whether it seeks to engage the rest of the world in a constructive and sustained manner, or whether DPRK officials and diplomats are merely putting a good face forward to divert international attention from their country's reputation as a nuclear weapons-monger and human-rights violator," writes Katharine H.S. Moon in Project Syndicate.