Kim Jong Il - The clearest case for R2P?

With the media focus usually on North Korea’s nuclear testing and Kim Jong Il’s penchant for Hollywood blockbusters, what’s often cast aside is the humanitarian crisis that could arguably be the clearest case for the “responsibility to protect”.

Former president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel, former prime minister of Norway Kjnell Magme Bondevik and Elie Wiesel, a professor of humanities at Boston University make a compelling case in Our right to protect North Koreans from their leader:

…we commissioned a report on the failure of the North Korean government to exercise its responsibility to protect its own people.

The evidence and analysis in this report are deeply disturbing. Indeed, it is clear that North Korea is actively committing crimes against humanity — against its own people.

North Korea allowed perhaps 1 million — and possibly many more — of its own citizens to die during the famine in the 1990s. This was caused in part by the government's decision to reduce food purchases as international assistance increased so that it could divert resources to its military and nuclear program.

Hunger and starvation remain a persistent problem today, with more than 37 percent of North Korean children chronically malnourished. And yet North Korea has requested less food assistance from the World Food Program and refuses to let the program monitor food distribution in some 42 of 203 counties in the country.

This is to not even mention the over 200,000 questionable political prisoners in the country and the more than 400,00 people who died in the custody of the North Korean gulag over the past 30 years.

However, with such clear, ‘open’ cases for R2P like Uganda and Darfur, it makes you wonder if the UN Security Council is really going to have the patience to battle North Koreas closed borders or would even be able to turn their attention away form the nuclear question long enough to notice.