Human Rights Discourse in North Korea

Post-Colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives

Jiyoung Song

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136853142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This unique book examines the conceptual development of human rights in North Korea from historical, political and cultural perspectives.

Dr Jiyoung Song explains how North Korea has understood the concepts of human rights in its public documents since its independence from Japan in 1945. Through active campaigns and international criticism, foreign governments and non-governmental organisations outside North Korea have made numerous allegations of human rights violations. On the other hand, the efforts to engage with North Korea in order to improve the human rights situation through humanitarian assistance and to understand how North Koreans interpret human rights are often overshadowed by "naming and shaming" and "push-until-it-collapses" approaches. Using close readings and analyses of the collected works of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, North Korea's official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, as well interviews with North Korean defectors and diplomats in South Korea, China and Europe, Dr Song gives thought-provoking and highly debatable accounts for the historically post-colonial, politically Marxist and culturally Confucian elements of North Korean rights thinking.

As a piece of research on a nation shrouded in mystery this book will be essential reading for anyone researching human rights issues, Asian politics and international relations.

1
The evolution of international human rights

This chapter provides a history of the evolution of Western human rights covering some of the major debates in the field of contemporary international human rights. I aim to show that, far from being at odds with the overall development of human rights internationally, North Korean rights thinking has much in common with international ideas, although it may not ultimately be compatible with individualistic and liberal Western ideas of human rights. By way of background, the first part outlines the early development of natural rights theories and some of the distinctive features of Western ideas on the topic, particularly those of Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke as well as the views of their critics from Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, and contemporary rights theorists. Some of the critics of individualistic Western concepts of rights have a broad overlap with the rights perspectives of the DPRK: communitarian, culturally sensitive, or social-contract type of approaches to rights. I attempt to demonstrate that North Korean rights thinking may be correctly and properly situated in the broad field of international human rights.

The second half of this chapter surveys some of the most contentious issues raised in the field of international human rights especially since World War II. A number of themes, as aptly pointed out by Jeremy Waldron (1987: 3), tend to arise repeatedly in modern rights theories: abstract universalism, the individualism of rights, the tension between rights and the demands of community, the use of social contract models in the theory of politics, and the troublesome idea of natural law. I examine four topics here: (i) universalism versus cultural relativism, (ii) individual versus collective rights, (iii) civil and political rights versus economic and social rights, and finally, (iv) rights versus duties. Obviously, the DPRK takes the latter approach in each set of human rights debates. In order to get any kind of grip on the specificity of rights discourses in the DPRK, one clearly needs to come to a thorough understanding of these four areas in contemporary international human rights and their conceptualisation.

A historical overview of Western ideas on human rights

There are two important periods for understanding the language of rights in Western political thought. The first is the early to high middle ages (eleventh to thirteenth centuries), and the second runs from Grotius through to Locke (seventeenth century) (Tuck 1979: 2). A study of the key European philosophers in these periods will facilitate a better understanding of Western conceptions of human rights.

The role of Christianity

The first characteristic specific to the contemporary Western history of human rights is the formative role played by Christianity. Based on passages in the Bible and the religious teachings of St. Paul, the Church Fathers (first to fifth centuries), St. Augustine (354–430), St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), early Christian humanism came to exert an immense influence on the modern secular understanding of natural law and human rights (Ishay 1997: xv; Maritain 1952: 85).¹ Among these philosophers, Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE) and Aquinas have been especially instrumental in shaping modern conceptions of human rights. Aristotelian concepts of justice, virtue and natural rights have had a profound impact on the development of Judeo–Christian and Islamic political traditions. An Aristotelian legacy may still be felt in Orthodox Christian theology, especially within the Catholic tradition shaped by scholasticism. Aristotle’s key notion of an individual’s own personal happiness and well-being has had a wider influence on Western modes of personal life, being no less than the proper end or telos.

Preserving and in part modifying Aristotelian conceptions, the philosophy of Aquinas has exerted enormous influence on Western rights thinking. Aquinas was very unusual for his time in being able to grasp the idea of natural law, formulating the consistent doctrine of eternal, natural, human and divine laws plainly and clearly in his most famous work, Summa Theologiae. Aquinas distinguished four kinds of law: eternal, natural, human, and divine. Eternal law is God’s decree over all creation. Natural law reflects eternal law in the human sphere. Human law is the present day’s positive law and involves such issues as the death penalty, usury, and the forced baptism of the children of Jews. Divine law is the law revealed in religious texts.

Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) seems to be one of the rare Western classic rights theorists who undermined the theology-based assumptions of Protestant political thinkers whose basic premises were that ‘what God has shown to be his will, that is law’. He was notorious among his Protestant contemporaries for making his atheistic character too obvious. His theory about natural law, in a positivistic spirit, worked on the assumption that ‘there is no God or that he takes no care of human affairs’ (Tuck 1979: 76).

The list of Western philosophers and political leaders who make use of Christian concepts in their writings and speeches is considerable. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), for example, in his social contract theory, demanded a sovereign ruler treat his subjects well on account of a duty owing to God and ‘not to the subjects themselves’ (Feinberg 1980: 146; Finnis 1980: 208). John Selden (1584–1654) allowed God an even more central role in his theory than Hobbes by claiming that natural law was revealed to man in ‘God’s pronouncements to the Noachidae’.² John Locke (1632–1704), the origin of many contemporary liberal ideas of human rights, regarded natural rights as ‘an expression of God’s will’ and all men as ‘the servants of God’, sent into the world by his order and about his business (Waldron 1987: 12). Thomas Paine (1737–1809) stated that ‘the origin of rights is divine: they are given by God and are both natural and imprescriptible in character’.

Property rights and social contract

The second formative influence on the Western conception of human rights derives from the explicit implication of property rights in Medieval Europe. The emphasis placed upon individuals’ rights to property accompanied the emergence of mercantile capitalism and, in some cases, also came hand in hand with the absolutism of unrestrained monarchical power that imposed slavery in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. By the fourteenth century in Europe, ‘to have a right’ meant ‘to be the lord or dominus of one’s relevant moral world, to possess dominium, that is today, property’ (Tuck 1979: 3). Grotius treated liberty as a piece of property, being led by this comparison to believe that slavery and absolutism should be defended. Grotius thus stated that ‘it is lawful for any man to engage himself as a slave to whom he pleases’ (Tuck 1979: 60, 63). On the right of self-defence, Grotius noted that men no longer had a right to defend themselves against the sovereign since the sovereign’s life was more ‘utile’³ than his own or more ‘serviceable’ to many, and should therefore give themselves up to bondage or use in the interests of a king.

Conservatives like Selden and Hobbes continued fiercely to uphold the practices of mercantile capitalism, slavery and usury, and were prepared to accept a high degree of absolutism. To these theorists, an individual had no right to resist the magistrate (Tuck 1979: 119). Within his theory of social contract, Hobbes saw self-preservation, the protection of one’s life (including property), as the basic human aim (Lopata 1973: 204–7). In the Hobbesian worldview, men’s right to life is constantly threatened in the state of nature so that they come together to form a social contract. The purpose of a social contract is, therefore, to protect one’s right to life and property. The condition for one’s right to life was, in return, that one must subject oneself to an absolute sovereign ruler, whom Hobbes regarded as the very institution that determines all property relations. To Hobbes, there was no private property in the absence of sovereignty; the Leviathan⁴ and private property are necessarily concomitant (Lopata 1973: 207).

Locke’s theory of the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property may well be the clearest expression of the Western concept of property-based rights. Locke set out his philosophy in response to the divine right of kings and more generally to all theories of the natural ordination of political authority. In opposition to the absolute and divine right of kings proposed by conservatives, Locke’s natural rights theory was founded on the equality of human individuals. The function of the government was to secure man’s natural rights (to life, liberty, and property), which were the inalienable-claim rights, and corresponded to the duties of political authorities to protect them. In other words, rulers had a general duty not to harm their subjects. In spite of his advocacy of natural rights, political participation in Locke’s world was only envisioned as the preserve of ‘propertied Christian men’ (Donnelly 2003: 60), excluding women with ‘savages’, servants, and wage-labourers as potential rights holders.

Locke’s theory of a social contract was taken up and further developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who started from the Lockean premise that all men are free and equal in the state of nature. Social contract theory was associated with the belief that existing political relationships were founded on an original agreement among people living in a given territory to establish institutions and procedures for the better protection of rights. While Locke was prepared to accept the legitimacy of most political regimes, Rousseau believed a regime’s legitimacy depended on laying down minimum conditions for political respectability. His ideas have laid the groundwork for the principles of French revolutionary thought, notably the formulation of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (Waldron 1987: 21).

Legal positivism

The third feature distinctive to the Western tradition of human rights is its legal positivism – that is the principle that law is something ‘posited’ or stated and not otherwise given. According to this principle, law is not derived from some higher guiding principle, but rather developed by people for their mutual benefit. Numerous constitutions and declarations such as the English Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Rights (1628), the Habeas Corpus Act (1679), the Bill of Rights (1689), the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (hereafter, the 1789 French Declaration), all bear the imprint of legal positivism in reaffirming natural rights theorists.

Grotius was one of the first positivists to formulate a legal foundation for natural rights. He provided a legal foundation, distinguishing two senses of ‘recht’, the wider sense of what is right and the narrower sense of a right proper (Tuck 1979: 67). The wider sense of right is generally considered as righteousness or justice. What requires special attention here is his narrower sense of right, a right proper, which is similar to contemporary concepts of human rights. He defined a right proper as ‘the relations which exist between a reasonable being and something appropriate to him by merit or property’. Merit is fitness for any object of desire. The kind of right that takes account of merit is called ‘distributive justice’, the term that has gained currency through the work of the contemporary normative theorist John Rawls. In this sense, merit commonly employs the rule of proportion. On the other hand, property is something called ours and the kind of property is ‘commutative justice’ or simply the rule of equality. Grotius represented a turning point in the evolution of Western rights theories in terms of his formulation of rights through a radically different legal conceptualisation such as these two, merit and property. However, like other conservatives, he could not entirely pull himself away from totalitarian tenets such as support for absolutism and the idea that the right to self-defence is void before an absolute sovereign ruler.

Critics of natural rights

The theory of natural rights met with strong criticism from various political thinkers during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Thinkers as diverse as Edmund Burke (1729–97), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), John Stuart Mill (1806–73), and Karl Marx (1818–83) attacked the idea for its high level of abstraction, exaggeration of reasoning in political philosophy, over-emphasis on the individualistic approach to social life, and unjustified egoism in moral argument.

Burke rejected the idea that rights were universal and instead believed that real rights were relative to the particular socio-political structure of each community – a view which can be seen as contemporary cultural relativism. He opposed the revolutionary character of the rights of man envisioned in the 1789 French Declaration. Burke’s views were built both upon his religious conservatism and his cynicism in relation to the political capability of the people and the feasibility of democracy.⁵

Bentham opposed natural rights as being nonsensical, devoid of any meaning, and full of contradictions and ambiguities. He criticised Locke’s idea of individual liberty based on natural rights ‘as nonsense upon stilts’. His utilitarianism further held that the demand for rights was disruptive to the political and legal order. According to Bentham, a strong proponent of legal positivism, the only rights are ‘rights proper’ (Bentham 1843: vol.2, 501; vol.3, 221; Hart 1973: 171–201). A right and a legal right are thus the same thing and can only be justified according to public utility – that is, the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’. He concluded that natural rights were ‘simply nonsense’, ‘terrorist language’, ‘rhetorical nonsense’, or ‘nonsense upon stilts’ (Waldron 1987: 73).

Mill was less critical of natural right...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Korean Studies
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The evolution of international human rights
• 2 Late Chosun philosophies and human rights
• 3 Post-colonial people’s rights: 1945–8
• 4 The Marxist rights thinking of the DPRK
• 5 Human rights in Juche Ideology
• 6 ‘Our style’ of human rights
• Conclusion
• References
• Index