Page 30 - NKHR Hawaii Conference 2023

PANEL DISCUSSION

about how we can carry forward both the values that are underpinned in the Alliance and
under UDHR.

DR. STEPHEN NOERPER

Thank you, Ambassador Turner. Ambassador Tan, you mentioned you just came from
Seoul and have served as an ambassador on issues that concerned this subject in the
prior administration. Now you represent a voice of the Sages Group, the elders who are
advancing this along with the Commission of Inquiry investigators who were welcomed
by President Yoon Suk Yeol during the course of your meetings there in Seoul last week.

How do you balance issues of security and human rights and what do you think on this,
the 10th anniversary of the COI Report? About what we can do moving forward to grow
awareness or to invigorate the results of the COI, the most comprehensive report on
North Korean human rights atrocities?

AMBASSADOR MORSE TAN
Yes, the COI Report helped to bring to the forefront of people’s minds the gross human
rights violations going on in North Korea, I would say more than any other single
document. So it’s played a major role in that regard.

I don’t believe that human rights issues should be sidelined in favor of security issues. I
think addressing them both together increases the chances of solving either a crisis or
both issues together. There has been a history of sidelining human rights in favour of
security and that does not help because the Kim Jong Un regime fears prosecution. T ey
fear prosecution.

And so one of the things I said in Korea is that, in Korea, based on their constitution,
everybody on the peninsula is a Korean citizen including everyone in North Korea.
And they can engage in an “in absentia” indictment which means an indictment can
happen without any of the North Korean defendants being present in South Korea. If
that indictment happens, then there could be a warrant for the arrest of Kim Jong Un.
And that would cramp his ability to travel, his ability to go to other countries. It would
increase the fear that he and others have.

And it’s never been tried. It’s never been done in South Korea. I’ve heard different