Before he agreed to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, President Donald Trump called him a vicious human rights abuser — “a madman who doesn't mind starving or killing his people.” He has described a “horror of life” that is “so complete that citizens … would rather be slaves than live in North Korea.” To his State of the Union address in January, Trump invited a North Korean defector — an amputee who'd fled the country on a set of crutches that he defiantly raised for the cameras as Trump hailed his escape from the “depraved” regime.

Now, as Trump prepares for an unprecedented meeting with Kim to discuss eliminating Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, he has dropped that tough rhetoric and shown no sign that the human rights of North Korea’s citizens will play a role in the talks.


Hoping to change that, a dozen rights groups led by Amnesty International USA sent Trump a letter this week asking him to urge North Korea to release political prisoners and take other steps “to improve its human rights record.” The letter comes on the heels of congressional efforts to spotlight North Korea’s rights abuses, including a bipartisan resolution introduced in April condemning the country’s labor camps.

Although it’s unclear whether those gestures will influence Trump’s thinking, they do underscore the complexity of cutting a deal with what may be the world’s most repressive regime.

Trump’s main goal in the upcoming talks, slated for late May or early June, is to persuade Kim to give up his nuclear arsenal. Anything that muddies the conversation could give Kim — who tolerates no criticism of his domestic policies — grounds to demand more concessions from Washington or even walk away.

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But if Trump simply ignores North Korea’s atrocious human rights record, he’ll expose himself to charges of hypocrisy.

Trump also has repeatedly blasted the Iran nuclear deal, negotiated under former President Barack Obama, for narrowly focusing on nuclear issues without tackling Tehran’s non-nuclear misbehavior. Now that Trump has a shot at making a deal with North Korea, will he, too, settle for an arrangement that ignores the country’s non-nuclear activities?

“President Trump is very fond of saying ‘Nobody knew this thing could be so complicated,’ but it’s always complicated – there are always multiple competing priorities,” said Jon Wolfsthal, who worked on North Korea and other nuclear-related issues for Obama. “Trump is going to have to figure out his own solution, and if it doesn’t include everything other people see as a priority, he will be criticized for it.”

North Korea is a totalitarian police state with socialist roots. Most of its 25 million people are poor, while even the elite live in fear of the state. The 30-something Kim, following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, is thought to have final say on nearly every major government decision. Kim has a barbarous personal reputation: he’s alleged to have executed his uncle and assassinated a half-brother in his quest to consolidate power following his father’s death in 2011.

According to the State Department’s most recent global human rights report, at least 80,000 North Koreans – and possibly many more – are being held as political prisoners. The government often punishes the entire family of a person it says violated its laws, sentencing many to forced labor. North Koreans who have fled the country describe a place with severe restrictions on speech, assembly and other freedoms.

A group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers introduced a resolution last month denouncing North Korea’s labor camps and other abuses, a sign that U.S. lawmakers remain keenly aware of the country’s human rights violations even as Trump prepares to meet with Kim.

“North Korea’s labor camp system is a crime against humanity,” said Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. “It is the duty of the United States — and of every country of conscience — to stand up and stand together in voicing our collective condemnation of these horrors. Our actions will send a clear message to Mr. Kim that the world will not tolerate such savagery.”

North Korea also has a history of imprisoning or abducting foreigners, including Japanese citizens. At least three Americans are in the country’s custody now. One American held for months by North Korea, Otto Warmbier, was sent back to the U.S. in a vegetative state and died soon afterward last year, a case that led Trump to lash out at North Korea’s “brutal regime.”

Trump has generally downplayed the role of human rights in his foreign policy. He’s promised allies such as Saudi Arabia he won’t lecture them on how to treat their citizens. In a visit to China and other Asian countries last fall, Trump pointedly avoided the topic.

But in the case of hostile nations such as North Korea and Iran, Trump often brings up human rights to offer cover for tough policies.

That was Trump’s approach towards Kim’s regime until this spring. But as plans for the summit with Kim have taken shape in recent weeks, Trump’s tone has softened.

After months of deriding the North Korean leader as “little rocket man,” Trump last month praised Kim for being “very open” to talks and said he’s been “very honorable.”

Asked if Trump will include human rights as an agenda item in the upcoming summit, a senior administration official said: "I can’t go into details on the president’s negotiation strategy in advance of the meeting. But I would point out that the president invited North Korean defectors into the Oval Office, and he carries their stories with him."

At Congress’s direction, the Obama and George W. Bush administrations appointed special envoys specifically focused on human rights in North Korea — a position the Trump administration has not filled. In 2016, the Obama administration, in an unprecedented action, levied sanctions on individual North Korean leaders, including Kim himself, over human rights violations.

Even so, previous nuclear talks with North Korea in the 1990s and mid-2000s did not emphasize human rights, according to multiple former U.S. officials and analysts. The concern was that “raising human rights would have obstructed a nuclear deal," said Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a non-government organization. "To put it simply, they didn’t want to upset the North Koreans."

“President Bush felt very strongly about it, meeting with defectors in the Oval Office and creating the first-ever North Korea refugee resettlement program in the U.S.," added Victor Cha, a North Korea analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But even the Bush administration concluded those issues should be addressed only after a nuclear agreement was in place, ideally as part of broader talks about normalizing relations. The negotiations never got that far.

Analysts and former U.S. officials cite the Iran nuclear deal as an example of how difficult it is for the United States to strike anything other than a narrow bargain with a foreign adversary.

The 2015 Iran deal offered Tehran relief from international sanctions in exchange for severe curbs on its nuclear program. Iran strongly resisted broadening the deal beyond nuclear issues, although a series of side negotiations did lead to the release of a handful of U.S. citizens detained in Iran.

Trump has scheduled an announcement about the Iran deal for Tuesday afternoon, and most foreign policy experts believe he will deal it a crippling, possibly fatal, blow. While Trump hasn't explicitly said the deal should have dealt with Iran's human rights abuses, he's frequently denounced Iran’s repressive policies and insisted the United States should have aimed for something closer to a "grand bargain" with Iran as opposed to just an arms control deal.

“They should have made a deal that covered Yemen, that covered Syria, that covered other parts of the Middle East,” Trump said, mentioning conflicts in which Iran is involved. “No matter where you go in the Middle East, you see the fingerprints of Iran behind problems.”

Some analysts say it’s especially important for Trump to be talking about human rights in North Korea now, before and during his meeting with Kim, to make clear that the United States cares about the topic. Otherwise Kim may walk away from talks with Trump believing that it's not a priority for the U.S., giving his aides an excuse to avoid the topic in later, lower-level negotiations, especially if the talks ever delve into the possibility of normalizing diplomatic relations.

“The summit is likely to set the agenda and parameters for that process, and it’s therefore essential for Kim to clearly understand that this is an issue that matters at the highest level of the U.S. government," said Laura Rosenberger, a former National Security Council specialist in Asia.

At the behest of Japanese officials, Trump is reported to have promised to talk to Kim about releasing Japanese citizens North Korea has abducted in past years. The U.S. president also is expected to push Kim to release Americans in his custody – there are hopes the North Korean leader will do that as a gesture of goodwill before meeting with Trump.

The parents of Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old year-old University of Virginia student who died last year after being arrested while visiting North Korea, are suing the regime in Pyongyang and promising to keep speaking out about its human rights violations. According to media reports, Trump has spoken to the parents in recent days, offering emotional support.

But while human rights activists support Trump's efforts on behalf of abductees and detainees, they warn that he should not limit his discussion of human rights to how North Korea treats foreigners. The letter released Monday lays out specific suggestions, which include urging Kim to open North Korea's detention camps to international observers; free prisoners held over their political or religious beliefs; allow North Koreans to leave the country; and cooperate with United Nations human rights officials.

The activists also call on Trump to provide humanitarian aid to North Korea, where hunger is widespread. And they urge not to try de-linking human rights from the broader national security issues at stake.

“We strongly believe that the United States and others in the international community should not hold back on condemning human rights abuses in an effort to support diplomatic dialogues,” the letter states.

Cha, who served in the Bush administration and was considered but ultimately passed over by Trump to be his ambassador to South Korea, said that the rising global interest in North Korea's human rights situation makes the issue a tough one to avoid.

"Personally, I think the human rights agenda fits well with any nuclear negotiation because human rights reform in the North would automatically make more credible any nuclear deal," Cha wrote in an email. "It would represent real efforts by the regime at improving the human condition for all North Koreans, not just the 2 million elite."