Rights issue in shadows at Trump-kim meet?

Human rights observers demand that the grave abuses in North Korea must be part of the negotiations at the summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. However, there are signs that talking about Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme and its fear of Washington’s military power will leave no place for addressing the plight of people in the secluded Communist country.

“Human rights, security and peace are interlinked — definitely,” said Tomas Ojea Quintana, the UN rights observer for North Korea.

With only days to go until the Singapore summit on Tuesday, Ojea urged Pyongyang to release hundreds of inmates from political prisoner camps as a goodwill gesture.

In addition, the North Korean leadership should start cooperating with UN human rights bodies and representatives, including himself, the Argentinian UN rights expert told reporters in Geneva.

“It will show that they want to become a normal state,” he said.

In a comprehensive 2014 report, UN human rights investigators estimated the number of political prisoners at between 80,000 and 120,000.

The North’s government maintains control over its people through widespread arrests, punishment, torture, forced labour and executions and by denying them political rights, the Us-based group Human Rights Watch said this week.

“As the Kim-trump summit in Singapore approaches, the world should demand improvements instead of ignoring the dire human rights situation facing 25 million people in North Korea,” the group’s Asia Director, Brad Adams, said in a statement.

However, the issue does not seem to be very high on Trump’s agenda.

After the president met senior North Korean envoy Kim Yong Chol in the White House last week to prepare for the summit, he told reporters that they had not talked about human rights.

When Trump was asked whether he would discuss the issue with Kim, he answered: “Could be. Yeah. Could be. I think we probably will, and maybe in great detail.”

Even though experts agree that this issue is an important one that should be eventually addressed, some say there are valid reasons not to do so in Singapore.

“I really think it would be a mistake to overload the agenda,” said Joseph Yun, who served as US special representative for North Korea until March.

In a US senate foreign policy hearing, he said that there are various issues that do not strictly fall under the nuclear disarmament agenda of the talks, such as human rights, Pyongang’s abductions of Japanese citizens, North Korean refugees, as well as the North’s biochemical and conventional weapons.

Broaching human rights could run counter to providing US security guarantees to Kim, the former senior US diplomat said, arguing that such guarantees also mean that the US will not interfere in North Korean domestic politics.

Pyongyang may have warned that the human rights issue could derail the summit, according to Lisa Collins, a Korea expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

When the North’s Korean Central News Agency called off a high-level meeting with South Korea and threatened the cancellation of the Trump-kim summit in mid-may, it referred to a Northern defector and rights advocate who had recently addressed the legislature in Seoul.

“This may have been a simultaneous warning both to Seoul, to keep [the defector] from speaking publicly, and to Washington to warn negotiators not to bring up the issue of human rights at the June summit,” Collins wrote in a commentary.

In Geneva, Ojea seemed to acknowledge that Pyongyang’s interlocutors need to be very careful not to stoke fears about regime change in North Korea.

“Human rights are not meant to put any system at risk,” but should simply improve the lives of North Korea’s citizens, he said.

North Korea maintains control over its people through arrests, punishment, torture, forced labour and executions