ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a history of the evolution of Western human rights covering some of the major debates in the fi eld of contemporary international human rights. I aim to show that, far from being at odds with the overall development of human rights internationally, North Korean rights thinking has much in common with international ideas, although it may not ultimately be compatible with individualistic and liberal Western ideas of human rights. By way of background, the fi rst part outlines the early development of natural rights theories and some of the distinctive features of Western ideas on the topic, particularly those of Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke as well as the views of their critics from Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, and contemporary rights theorists. Some of the critics of individualistic Western concepts of rights have a broad overlap with the rights perspectives of the DPRK: communitarian, culturally sensitive, or social-contract type of approaches to rights. I attempt to demonstrate that North Korean rights thinking may be correctly and properly situated in the broad fi eld of international human rights. The second half of this chapter surveys some of the most contentious issues raised in the fi eld of international human rights especially since World War II. A number of themes, as aptly pointed out by Jeremy Waldron (1987: 3), tend to arise repeatedly in modern rights theories: abstract universalism, the individualism of rights, the tension between rights and the demands of community, the use of social contract models in the theory of politics, and the troublesome idea of natural law. I examine four topics here: (i) universalism versus cultural relativism, (ii) individual versus collective rights, (iii) civil and political rights versus economic and social rights, and fi nally, (iv) rights versus duties. Obviously, the DPRK takes the latter approach in each set of human rights debates. In order to get any kind of grip on the specifi city of rights discourses in the DPRK, one clearly needs to come to a thorough understanding of these four areas in contemporary international human rights and their conceptualisation.
