Can the UN Stop Kims Human Rights Crimes?Joel Brinkley

The hopelessly feckless United Nations Human Rights Committee has finally come up with a seemingly worthwhile project: A serious investigations of human-rights violations in North Korea.When most people think of North Korea, the first problems that come to mind are nuclear weapons and long-range missile tests, or the bellicose threats against South Korea and the United States, or the countrys general hostility to the Western world.Yet what lies behind that, seldom discussed, is a world of human-rights abuses. A new United Nations studyfindsthat two-thirds of North Koreans have no idea where their next meal is coming from. About one quarter of the states children grow up stunted for lack of nutrition during the first year of life. (This under a regime thatsendsmilitary aircraft to China to bring back take-out Big Macs and fries for government leaders.)Stunting, or chronic malnutrition, has an irreversible impact on childrens physical and intellectual development, UNICEFreports. Whats more, just 40 percent of North Koreans have access to a toilet.With all of that and so much more, the UNs Office of Humanitarian Affairs urged the rest of the world to realize that humanitarian aid should be neutral, impartial and should not be contingent on political developments. (A worthwhile idea, certainly, but politically difficult.)Reinforcing that, a few days ago Marzuki Darusman, the Human Rights Committees special rapporteur for North Korea,reportedthat grave human-rights violations in prison camps or the mere existence of slave camps may amount to crimes against humanity. He told the committee, in the words of onenews report, of mass starvation, prison camps, and no recourse or judicial system for people accused of crimes.Then he urged the committee to create an independent commission to investigate the terrible state of affairs in North Korea and make recommendations for possible action against North Korean officials, who authorize the lowest expenditures for health care, per capita, of any nation on earth. The same officials also oversee the states largest industry: military equipment. (The two smallest are food production and tourism.)The problem is that North Korea will never cooperate with any UN investigation. In fact, during his years as rapporteur, North Korea never once let Darusman in the country. Most of the known information came from exiles who managed to fleea challenge all by itself.Earlier this year, Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, alsocalledfor a full fledged international inquiry into serious crimes, including summary executions, rape, slave labor, and other forms of collective punishment, constituting the worstbut least understood and reportedhuman rights situation in the world.All of that is true, but theres little reason to believe that, even with this new resolve, the UN investigators will have any more success investigating the problem now than they have in the past.

Europe's Baby Boxes & China's Coerced AbortionsJoel Brinkley

The news from two neighboring states one day this month offered a confounding paradox.In Beijing, a government think tank published a major report urging China to revise its highly divisive one-child policy so that, by 2015, families could have a second child. As it is, the Chinese authorities order involuntary abortions, sterilizations, tubal ligations, and other means to forcibly prevent women from having a second child.Next door in Russia the same day, health officials installed the nations tenth baby box.The purpose of the boxes: Parents who dont want their new babies can place them in the baby box, push a button, and then run away. A nurse or other caregiver will come fetch the child and presumably put it up for adoption.Before baby boxes came along this year, Russian authorities cataloged 268 cases of parents abandoning their newborn childrendropping them in trash dumpsters, tossing them in snowdrifts, leaving them in the forest.Baby boxes are proliferating across Europe so fast that the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child is in a near-panic, arguing that dropping children in boxes contravenes the right of the child to be known and cared for by his or her parents.The committee says more than 200 baby boxes have now been installed across Europe, and nearly 500 babies have been left in them, even though the boxes violate key provisions of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child.So whats worse: Having your rights abridged while youre adopted and cared for or having your rights abridged while you die in a dumpster?Children are treated no better in China. Last summer, photos of a mother who was seven months pregnant with her second child and forced to have an abortion went viral on Sina Weibo, Chinas equivalent to Twitter. One picture showed the dead fetus in a bucket of water.Our country is run by animals, a typical Weibo commenter said.That particular abortion got lots of attention, but as most Chinese know, its far from unusual. Yang Zhizhu, an associate professor of law at China Youth University, obtained Ministry of Health statistics showing that, on average, China performs 7 million abortions a year. Its impossible to know how many of those may be voluntary, henotesin his blog. But in a nation where much of the population fights the one-child rule, voluntary abortions are probably rare.Mandated abortions employ violence and coercion, he wrote. There are population schools that illegally detain the parents, grandparents, and husband of the pregnant woman, or even the woman herself, in order to force them into willingness. Neighbors, too, will scare the pregnant woman into willingness, sometimes by vandalizing her home.The situation is so ghastly and absurd that Chinese families would probably have better luck getting new children from Russian baby boxes.