ABSTRACT

As we saw in the previous chapter, collective interests, the primacy of socioeconomic rights, and citizens’ duties before rights, already existed in traditional Korean philosophies such as Confucianism, Sirhak, and Tonghak, prevalent in the late Chosun period. They intertwined with Marxist ideas to shape contemporary ideas of human rights in the DPRK. Another strong ideational factor for the formation of human rights concepts throughout the North Korean history is post-colonialism. This chapter, therefore, focuses on the rights characteristics during the so-called interim government period of the DPRK from August 1945 to September 1948, which included a wide range of institutionalised human rights. It shows the domestic and international factors that infl uenced the formation of early rights concepts in the DPRK: the post-colonial nation-building process, the Soviet infl uence, and the Kim Il Sung factor. Accordingly, these factors affected certain rights characteristics in North Korea: (i) the ‘negative’ People’s rights intended to undo the repressive Japanese colonial practices and the ‘positive’ People’s rights that would create an exclusively human rights-friendly independent nation-state, (ii) People’s rights imported from the Kremlin, and (iii) the ‘koreanisation’ of People’s rights.