White House advisor to be North Korean envoy
- Aug 15, 2005 - comment
President Bush has named Jay Lefkowitz, a White House domestic policy advisor, as special envoy on human rights in North Korea. The White House announced Lefkowitz’s appointment Aug. 19.
In a post established by the 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act, Lefkowitz will work to promote human rights in a country considered by some observers as the most closed and repressive in the world. The White House said he “will greatly enhance our efforts to encourage North Korea to accept and abide by internationally accepted human rights standards and norms.”
The United States and four other countries recently held negotiations with North Korea in an attempt to convince the communist state to shut down its nuclear weapons program. No agreement was reached.
North Korea’s dictatorship under Kim Jong Il reportedly is guilty of the detention, torture—including forced abortions—and execution of political prisoners. Human rights officials estimate 200,000 political prisoners are in North Korea’s gulag system and about 400,000 prisoners have died in those prisons in the last three decades. The regime has diverted foreign food aid to the military or the black market, which has contributed to the starvation of anywhere from two million to more than four million North Koreans since a famine began in 1995, it has been estimated.
Lefkowitz has served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland, and the American delegation to the International Conference on Anti-Semitism.
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