The DPRK and the International Responsibility to Protect

Human rights violations in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are often described as being without parallel in the contemporary world, with longstanding allegations of grave, widespread, and systematic violations committed by the state authorities against citizens of the DPRK and other countries encompassing all but one of the eleven crimes against humanity enumerated in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. However, while the case of the DPRK remains the most longstanding RtoP crisis that exists and spans the entirety of the post-World Summit era, it nonetheless remains largely neglected within the academic literature. Drawing on critical constructivist norm theory, this thesis explores how RtoP has been used to address the human rights situation in the DPRK over the last two decades and how useful these various uses have been in fulfilling the international responsibility to protect. It argues that RtoP as an intermediary norm has been largely peripheral to the broader international response as evident across debates at the Security Council, Human Rights Council, and General Assembly since the adoption of RtoP at the UN World Summit in 2005. The various meanings of RtoP as investigation and accountability advanced by DPRK human rights advocates have proven ineffectual in shaping the behaviour of member states for reasons both intrinsic to the norm and specific to the case of the DPRK and have become an increasingly limited part of the discourse in recent years. The thesis further suggests that the case of the DPRK therefore warrants far greater consideration by scholars and practitioners alike and prompts difficult questions about the status and role of RtoP as an international norm.