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On September 28, the United States Senate unanimously passed the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004. The bill, which must now pass the House of Representatives, authorizes the naming of a human-rights envoy and allows the release of humanitarian funds to nongovernmental organizations that aid North Korean refugees. Human-rights advocate Michael Horowitz, senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, discussed the meaning of the legislation with Associate News Editor Stan Guthrie.

What is the significance of the passage of this act?

Here's an abused term, but in this case, I have come to feel that it is literally correct to call this success a miracle. The odds couldn't have been heavier. Here was a bill that had to come before the United States Senate in the closing days of the congressional session, under circumstances where a single Senate objection would kill the bill. It had to operate under a unanimous consent procedure, and where the bill was being bitterly opposed by the South Korean government. The North Korean regime was claiming the passage of the bill would be provocative and lead to every apocalyptic threat they could issue. Many in the State Department were absolutely hostile to the bill's purposes. There were a number of Democratic leaders who had every reason to find in the bill real barriers to their preferred approach for dealing with North Korea. What the bill did was elevate the status of human rights in North Korea and make it a necessary element of any bargaining process and relationship that the United States and [North] Korea had. And of course this ran directly contrary to the views of people who want to resuscitate the so-called "framework agreement" that the Clinton administration, had where we gave them legitimacy and billions of dollars in exchange for WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] promises. And it ran directly contrary to the Sunshine Policy, so called, of the South Korean government, which had repeatedly said, had literally said, that a high policy priority the South Korean government, indeed its highest policy priority, was to keep the Pyongyang regime in business because the economic consequences to South Korea of the collapse of the North would be too troublesome, too grave.

And not only was it passed, but remarkably, the final Senate version was considerably stronger than the House bill, that all of these forces tried to block.

What were the key elements of strengthening?

There were two powerful additions, and there were others as well. The first was that the Helsinki model was explicitly set out as the model that the United States ought to follow in its dealings with North Korea. The Helsinki model involved negotiations with the Soviet Union during the Nixon years where bluster and threat from the Soviet Union—just as it's coming from North Korea—and the threat of nuclear war unless the security needs of the Soviet Union were satisfied by the West was backed by the United States with a willingness to deal with those issues, provided that the entire basket of human rights issues within the Soviet Union itself would be on the table. The Soviets agreed to that—and of course, in the process, wound up swallowing the poison pill. That was the first, and in many ways the critical, step in the implosion of the Soviet Union, letting that genie out of the bottle of making the issue of human rights central and … having the Soviet Union acknowledge the legitimacy of those issues.

The second, in a practical way, was just an astonishing change. The Senate bill calls for the appointment of a special envoy for human rights to be designated by the President. And the legislation further provides that this person must be a person of recognized international stature in the field of human rights.

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48