The author (Simon Hutagalung) says North Korea’s nukes, missiles, and sanctions talks crowd out a documented, decades-old human-rights and hunger crisis. Surveillance, collective family punishment, camps (forced labour, torture, starvation, executions), and information control are treated as how the regime survives—so they belong in the same file as foreign policy, not a sidebar.

Even when grain eases, people still hunt black-market food; those informal markets look like autonomy to Pyongyang and stay suspect. Prioritising stockpiles over rights, he argues, teaches the regime that missiles buy concessions and that “irrational” behaviour is cost-free so long as the family stays in power.

Fix: fold rights and refugee protection into regional security talks; use ASEAN’s channel to Pyongyang to say militarisation and abuse threaten the Indo-Pacific. Security that ignores how the state is held together is incomplete. Sources cited: HRW, February 2026.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) continues to be one of the world’s worst human rights abusers and is facing one of the world’s most serious humanitarian crises. Although the crisis has been well-documented by the United Nations, human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the international press, and defectors from the country for decades, severe and widespread human rights abuses in North Korea continue to receive very little attention from the international community in the face of foreign policy concerns.

All too often, discussion of the DPRK’s nuclear capabilities, test launches of ballistic missiles, and even discussion of sanctions against North Korea fail to connect these issues to the very real and fundamental human rights abuses being perpetrated on a massive scale against the people of North Korea.........

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