North Korea News Podcast by NK News - James Heenan: Inside the UN’s new human rights report on North Korea

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

James Heenan, the representative of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, joins the podcast this week to unpack the High Commissioner’s new update on human rights in the DPRK — an effort to take stock of the situation in the country 11 years after the landmark U.N. Commission of […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast, available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the private podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NKNews website at NKNews.org slash private-feed. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jacko's wetsuit, and today this episode is being recorded on Tuesday, the 23rd of September 2025. We have a returning guest. That's James Heenan, who is the representative for the United Nations Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights. rights in Seoul. That's a mouthful. You can find them on Twitter or some people call it

X at UN Rights Soul. James, welcome back. You're right. Thanks to be back, Jacko. You're here to talk about the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Career. That is, of course, an update on the Commission of Inquiries report that came out in 2014. So it's sort of 11 years on, where are we now? It's a big picture, right? Yeah, that's a nutshell summary. Okay, so let's start with a big question. if you had 90 seconds with a skeptical foreign minister who thinks, we've heard all this before, we know things are bad in North Korea, tell us what's genuinely new in this report and why should governments care now?

So it's not like nothing has happened over the last 10 years. I mean, the UN itself has produced 54 reports in 10 years. So there's a lot of information out there. There's not too much that's unknown. There's always a few nuggets of information that come out, but there's nothing much that's unknown. What this report does is it looks at it with a trend analysis. It looks at the trend over the whole 10 years.

Each year we talk about different things happening. There might be some blips here and there. But not before have we had such a report that looks at the trends. It's the most comprehensive report there is out there in terms of over the 10 years, in terms of not just the breadth of rights, but the number of interviewees. It's primarily based on 314 interviews. So there's no other report out there that does that. There's no other report that does the trend analysis.

And the important thing is those 314 interviewees have come out. during that reporting period. Yeah, people who left after 2014, which is a challenge because, as you know, the more recent escopies are more reticent to speak because they still have found me in the north. And when I talk about interviewees, they are all victims and witnesses.

I don't include in the other hundreds of people we spoke to who are experts or academics or whatever. So it's purely victims and witnesses. Right. And so, yes, this report, which is still quite brief, It's only, what, 15 pages long the text of it. I read it myself over the weekend, but there's a list of, there's an annex at the back, which basically takes you to all those individual reports that you've mentioned that have come out over the years, right?

So this is kind of, this report is zooming out, giving the big picture, but if you want to zoom in, those links are there. That's right, that's right, that's exactly right. Okay, what's the linkage between human rights and peace and security on the Korean Peninsula? Some listeners might not immediately see the direct connection. Well, it's sort of many things to many people, but ultimately everyone agrees there is a link. So for some people, it's the fact that resources, state resources, are directed towards militarisation, be it nuclear or ballistic technology, and at the same time when there's terrible gaps in provision of health care and food.

We report that the DPRK says they're spending about 15 to 16% of their budget, state budget, on down forces. So there's a legitimate question there. If you had less spending there, you'd be looking after the human rights. to food and health more effectively. Now, every country has this balance to make. And other countries have also very high spending on the military, but in this case where you have a massive gap

between spending a military and the situation in terms of the adequate standard of living of the population, it's a legitimate question. Others say, for example, that the use of forced labour to build roads and buildings with shock brigades or to have kids doing the harvest at no cost, that also allows the state to push towards. push money towards militarization.

At the other end, you have people say, well, listen, the militaristic rhetoric, or how shall I say, the way in which the state is constructed actually undermines human rights or has an impact on human rights. So, for example, the status of women. Militarism has put women largely in the second row,

yeah, the vast majority of people going to military service of men. Women are seen to be, as they say, the wheels behind the revolution, behind the military or the flowers with the revolution. So it encases gender stereotypes. For men, we get a lot of men telling us, you know, I spent 10 years of the prime of my life in the military and now I come out and I have to catch up to get married

and have children and everything. So it means many things to many people, but ultimately the link is clear enough for us to say that you can't really deal with one without the other. Now, James, as my colleagues here at NK News have reported, with the release of your report, activists have argued that the update is light on genuinely new findings and should have zeroed in more on key perpetrators. What's your response and what constrained naming names here?

Well, we've just walked out of the presentation of the report in the Human Rights Council. It's just finished just now 15 minutes ago. Oh, that was done online, was it? Yes. Well, I mean it's a high commissioners report. We were following online. And the report was very well received by member states. Some member states questioned whether there should be this sort of focus on one country, but was very well received by member states and by international civil society who said that it accurately reflects what they see as being the situation. For us, we're the UN, we're not an NGO, we do what member states ask us to do, and our mandate was to provide a comprehensive update on the human rights situation of the past 10 years,

and to update on the recommendations of the commission inquiry, and that's what we did. Now, we did it in a fairly short report, but that's the way the UN. work. We have short reports. It's not like a commissioner inquiry, which is an independent body with its all separate staffing and funding. In fact, we had no extra funding for this report. But regardless of that, all High Commissioner reports are this length. But that was a good thing. It's much, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, it's much harder to write a short report than a long report. Long reports are actually quite easy to write. And this report started out as hundreds of pages and has been distilled down painstakingly to 15 pages.

But the benefits for me are enormous. First of all, people read it. Not everyone reads big, long reports. Secondly, the messaging is very clear. And thirdly, the press can digest it extremely quickly. So when it came out a few weeks ago, we had very, very broad and quite deep press coverage. And I'd put some of that down to the fact that the press could read it within 35 minutes.

You say that the report was presented to the council just, what, a few minutes ago before he came here today. Were any North Korean government representatives there at that meeting? No, they weren't in the chamber today, no. Is that presumably because they choose not to be there when their country's singled out? Yes, sometimes they turn up, sometimes they don't. And again, they're not alone in that. There's other countries that have mandates that are focused geographically also take the same approach. But they're certainly there.

They're certainly aware of it. They receive a copy of the report well before it's public. They are given the opportunity to comment, they're given the opportunity to provide input. And in fact, on this one it was interesting when we asked them to provide input. In addition to rejecting the mandate, they did say, well, you can take our input to another mechanism, the Universal Periodic Review. You can take that as input to this report. So there was that level of engagement with the DPRK. And the report does highlight some small areas of improvement or at least of opportunity in the future.

future. And that's what the report's about. We don't want another report that just catalogs how bad it is. We know that. The question is the future, how to look forward. And that's what the High Commissioner wanted to do and what he has done. He said, okay, this is a situation. This is what we've found. No improvement, generally, a few little bits of improvement, but bar those, generally none. And in some areas where there's been a significant degradation, which I can talk about. But let's, that is what it is. How do we make sure the next decade is not a lost decade as this one is, which is the way he termed. It's essentially like the title of the report, a lost decade. In terms of looking to the future, particularly, you know, in area of accountability,

some of the activists said that they'd like to see more naming of names, singling out of people who are actually to be targeted by, what, perhaps a future prosecution or something like that, some sort of retribution. What do you think? about that? Well, we're not a police or a judicial authority. We don't do that. Even if we could, it would undermine future criminal trials because it would be prejudicial towards them. So no, you don't do that in this country. You don't, NK News doesn't come out and say, we think that X, as a politician X, or say he is, as we say qualified, you say he is guilty of that. So no, we don't do it. We weren't asked to do that. And we also have another stream of work in the office,

which is to gather information and evidence for possible future accountability processes. And that's very technical, and you've got to be very careful not to make sure that that prejudices future trials. You can't put that material out there because the first thing the defence will do is stand up and say, but clearly you've gathered this evidence, but you've decided they're guilty before they've even come before a judge. So no, that's not the way the international community works. Is there anything that NGOs and activist groups can do over the next 12 months to help your organization to sharpen the next cycle of investigation and report writing? Well, we work very closely with our CSO partners because there's a number of them who do similar work in terms of documenting. We have worked with the community to try to make sure we're all on the same line in terms of methodology,

which is very important when you're handling not just sensitive information, but sometimes large volumes of sensitive information. We maintain the central repository for this information, which is mandated by member states. So we receive information from CSOs, and we'd like that. We've received quite a lot. We'd like to have that happen more regularly. We would like to make sure that the legal analysis is sharpened. You know, some areas of the law, there's new areas that could be pursued in respect of DPRK, but we need to be sure on the basics.

and I think that's an area where we'd like to work together. And ultimately, we would like to work on two particular streams. One is to encourage judicial proceedings where a member state decides to do that. That's up to a member state to decide a prosecutor and wherever to turn up, say, actually we would like to start these proceedings because we have so-and-so in detention in our country. But on the other hand, as we say regularly said in the report, you can't just sit there waiting for prosecutors to turn up. You have to be ready for it when they turn up.

we are, but you can't sit there and relying on that because otherwise nothing will happen. You have to look at the rights of victims and victims on the original national law have rights to a remedy, have rights to things like reparation and so forth. And that's why you've seen in the last two years a huge growth, and we talked about this last time, a huge growth in things like memorialisation and museums and plaques and truth telling and so forth. So on those things, we also see great value in working with our society partners. Can you give us one concrete example of something that's substantively new in this report? Maybe, for example, executions and punishments tied to foreign media exposure?

Well, people have talked about that one quite a lot. I mean, what this report does is it says based on a large number of interviews that we say this has happened, and it's also the United Nations saying it has happened, which is significant, yeah? We are very, we're extremely careful what we say. We have processes to make sure the information that we put out there is credible. We receive a number of allegations that we don't We don't talk about because we don't find them to be credible But those ones we do

The what's what as I said before The report is new in terms of the trends It's new in terms of the way in which some of the some of the rights are linked You see violations being linked for example You know this issue about women who would be the major major bread winners in the markets and also the ones looking after the home they are now as the markets are oppressed they're not able to earn the money they're still got to bring the money in because the husband is not being paid for the state assigned job i think we talked

about this last time but how does that intersect with the centralization of grain sales in the country and the report looks at that and sees how something seemingly unconnected to women's rights has a very gendered impact centralizing grain sales in state grain shops means that the burden on women has become exponentially bigger. And this is what people tell us as well. So they're the sorts of things that maybe we don't have time to do when we're doing a report every year or when we put out a thematic report. We're just looking at enforced disappearance or separated families. That's the value of this report. That's the new material. You mentioned that you get a lot of allegations and not all of those are able to be substantiated. Are there a couple of allegations that

you could point to that based on your 314 interviews with witnesses and victims, that those allegations are able to cross the line to confidence? Well, everything that's in the report. Yeah. Right, but I'm just looking, is there anything that comes in this report that maybe wasn't in the COI that you're able to identify and to confidently allege? Well, I mean, nothing that hasn't been reported before, really. I've said, see, the risk is that there's a sense that nothing's happened since the COI.

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