Alarm bells have gone off in Beijing, in Moscow, and even among some so-called “realists” in the West. They caution that the pending U.N. General Assembly consideration of an EU-Japan joint resolution on North Korean human rights violations, scheduled for December 18-19, could push Pyongyang over the edge. Publicly censuring North Korea for its crimes against humanity, they warn, might lead to a fourth nuclear test and even potentially trigger another military confrontation on the Korean peninsula. These voices, as a result, advocate continued silence despite overwhelming evidence of massive human rights violations, about which the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) report wrote the following: “The gravity, scale, and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the modern world.”

Discussion will also likely take place in the Security Council in the near future. In response to the COI report, Reuters noted on December 5 that “two-thirds of the U.N. Security Council’s members pushed . . . for the human rights situation in North Korea to be added to the council’s agenda and for a formal meeting to be held this month, a move that cannot be blocked by Pyongyang ally China.” So it seems that Pyongyang will no longer be able to escape international attention being paid to its long-standing, comprehensive abuses of its people.