The Chosun Ilbo reports:

North Korea will participate in the Paralympic Games for the first time ever in London this summer. A Yonhap News report cites Tokyo-based pro-North Korean media as saying that its athletes have been gearing up for the 2012 London Paralympics, which will run from late August to early September.

It adds that North Korea was granted provisional membership in the International Paralympic Committee in March, and that its athletes are now training in China.

Have any of that event’s organizers asked North Korea to explain the report by U.N. Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn that this regime “rounds up disabled people and sends them . . . to special camps, where they are sorted by handicap and subjected to ‘subhuman conditions?'” Or that it takes handicapped children from their families and sends them to camps where they become subjects for the kind of experiments Josef Mengele would have admired? Are the organizers of the Paralympics merely uninformed, or are they like the organizers of the World Cup — lacking in any consistent standards?

I have no way of knowing how many of those reports are true, of course, but I do know that in the case of North Korea alone, we fail to demand the right to investigate them. I can’t top Stephan Haggard’s phase for this: North Korean exceptionalism.