Don’t Trust North Korea until It Sheds Its Skin: North Korea’s Responses to UN Human Rights Recommendations

Comparative Politics
Authoritarian Regimes
International Relations
North Korea
Human Rights

Park, Sanghoon and Hyunkyu Kim. 2024. “Don’t Trust North Korea until It Sheds Its Skin: North Korea’s Responses to UN Human Rights Recommendations”

Authors
Affiliations

Political Science, Univeristy of South Carolina University; Kangwon Institute for Unification Studies, Kangwon National University

Hyunkyu Kim

Institute for Global Politics, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

Published

August 2024

Abstract

What motivates authoritarian states to participate in naming and shaming behaviors on human rights? The Universal Periodic Review is a unique process that requires all UN members to participate in peer review on human rights issues and has already finished its third cycle with active participation from Why does North Korea accept some human rights recommendations from the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (UN UPR) process while rejecting others? Despite lacking international incentives due to sanctions, North Korea participates as both a state under review and reviewer in the UN UPR. This paper examines how the sensitivity and specificity of recommendations, as well as North Korea’s geopolitical relationships with reviewer states, influence its decisions to accept human rights recommendations. Our findings show that the geopolitical relationships between Reviewers and North Korea do not significantly impact the likelihood of acceptance for specific or sensitive recommendations. In addition, we review recommendations accepted by North Korea following the second cycle. While the number of accepted recommendations has grown, there has been no significant improvement in fundamental human rights. Finally, North Korea’s engagement with the UN UPR is primarily a tool to manage its international image and maintain regime legitimacy rather than a genuine commitment to improving human rights.