U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea
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| Founded | October 2001 |
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| Type | Non-profit NGO |
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Key people
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Gordon Flake (Co-Chair, Board of Directors) Katrina Lantos Swett (Co-Chair, Board of Directors) Roberta Cohen (Co-Chair Emeritus, Board of Directors) Andrew Natsios (Co-Chair Emeritus, Board of Directors) Greg Scarlatoiu (Executive Director) |
| Website | www |
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), formerly known as the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, is a Washington D.C.-based non-governmental research organization that "seeks to raise awareness about conditions in North Korea and to publish research that focuses the world’s attention on human rights abuses in that country."
Founded in 2001 by a group of foreign policy and human rights specialists, HRNK has published twenty-three reports on issues relevant to North Korean human rights today. The Committee’s leadership has testified to Congress about North Korean human rights and China’s forced repatriation of North Korean refugees. In April 2012, HRNK held its first major conference on North Korean human rights to launch its publication, The Hidden Gulag, Second Edition on North Korean political prison camps.
HRNK was founded in 2001 by a group of foreign policy and human rights specialists to fill a gap in non-governmental expertise on North Korea. Well-established organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch initially found it difficult to incorporate North Korea, about which information is frequently difficult to obtain, into their models of research and advocacy. HRNK, in contrast, was an explicitly non-partisan research organization.
In 2003 HRNK released the first edition of The Hidden Gulag by David Hawk. This was the first comprehensive study of North Korea’s prison camp system.
From its inception, HRNK promoted itself as a non-partisan holder of expertise on North Korea in the United States. Early members of the Board of Directors included individuals with varying political affiliations and policy prescriptions—including Chuck Downs, Nicholas Eberstadt (of the American Enterprise Institute, conservative think-tank), Carl Gershman (president of National Endowment for Democracy), Morton I. Abramowitz (former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank), and Samantha Power (one of the Obama administration's proponents of the 2011 military intervention in Libya.). Co-chairs of the Board of Directors included US Representative Stephen J. Solarz (cosponsor of the 1991 Gulf War) and Ambassador James R. Lilley (CIA agent during 30 years in Asia, worked in Laos to undermine communist insurgency and he helped to insert a number of CIA agents into China. He was also a member of Ronald Reagan administration), for whom the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2001 is named. Solarz, a former New York Democratic congressman, was known as the "Marco Polo of Congress" for his long record of international travel and involvement in foreign affairs. Most notably, he was the first American politician to visit Kim Il-sung. Lilley was personally close to former President George HW Bush and served as Ambassador to the Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China. Both Solarz and Lilley garnered respect from both sides of the aisle and emphasized a spirit of bipartisan comity.
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