Let's go ahead and get started. So please take a seat. My name is Frank Aum. I run the North Korea program here at the US Institute of Peace. I'd like to welcome everyone. For those of you who are not familiar with USIP, we are a national independent institute that is funded by Congress. And we're focused on preventing, mitigating, and resolving conflict. It's great to have you guys here today. I'm very excited about today's event, especially because it puts a spotlight on an issue that often gets lost amid the discussion about the hard security issues like denuclearization. And this issue is the welfare of the North Korean people who are the real victims of the last 30 years of political stalemate. I'm also very excited because when I was a grad student in the early 2000s, and this is right after the famine in North Korea of the mid to late 1990s, I was really interested in finding out more and trying to find empirical evidence about the humanitarian impact of the crisis. And I came across an article in The Lancet Medical Journal that was written by a team led by Cortland Robinson, our main speaker today. And I'm very heartened that he has now published a more comprehensive report, a comprehensive not only in the scope of issues that are addressed that covers the human rights and the health and humanitarian concerns of North Korean children over the last 30 years, but again, comprehensive in the scope of time over the last 20, 25 years and also incorporating different studies that have been available in that time. So the way this will work is I will introduce Greg Skarladyu, who is the executive director of the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea. And then I'll let him talk a little bit more about HRNK. And then I'll let Greg introduce Cortland. And then Cortland will speak for about 20 minutes or so. And then we have a panel of three experts. Each of them will speak for 10 minutes, but I'll introduce them after Cortland speaks. So Greg is the executive director for the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea. He's also an expert who has spoken on a variety of issues related to the Korean Peninsula. And he's also taught on these issues as well. So let me turn it over to Greg right now. Well, Frank, my dear friend, thank you very much for the introduction. We very highly appreciate you hosting us here today. I don't know why we haven't done this before. Hopefully it's one event of many moving ahead. Delighted to be here. I'm also delighted to know that, of course, Dr. Robinson is here, the author of one of our latest reports, Last Generation, a true landmark report in the history of our organization, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. We're established in 2001 as America's only think tank slash NGO focused exclusively on researching, investigating and reporting on the North Korean human rights situation. Roberta Cohen, one of the panelists today is our co-chair emeritus, Helen Louise Hunter. Very good to see you, Helen Louise, until very recently as a board member. The HRNK still continues to be very involved and very supportive of the activities of our organization. This past season, this past fall season was extraordinarily busy at HRNK. Of course, Last Generation was one of three reports we published. Last Generation was the result of about court, I guess four or five years of very intensive research. You had your team travel to the region and I don't mean to steal your thunder, but again, this was an extraordinary effort and the results, expectations were very high but the results do exceed expectations. I have to say, of course, we published two other reports, one on the Organization and Guidance Department of North Korea. North Korea's most powerful government agency. This also happened in the fall of last year and also report on North Korea's information counteroffensive. So we're basically focused on vulnerable groups, women, children, this is what the report is about. North Korean regime dynamics and its impact on North Korea's policy of human rights denial and of course, North Korea's unlawful detention facilities. This is the first organization ever to use satellite imagery to investigate North Korea's political prison camps and other detention facilities. I'm absolutely delighted to turn the floor over to Dr. Cortland Robinson, a highly respected expert in the field of public health, a great Korea scholar as well, has spent so many years in Korea, grew up in Korea as a matter of fact. It's been an extraordinary privilege to work with Dr. Robinson and we are very grateful to have this second opportunity to feature his landmark report. Cort, I'm gonna turn the floor over to you, thank you. Should I take the podium? Whenever you, just so I can see this screen here. Maybe I'll sit if that's okay and manage two things at once, a clicker and a microphone. So we'll see how this goes. First of all, thank you to all of you for turning out. If there's anything that I hope this report does, it's simply to keep North Korea in our focus for both health and human rights humanitarian reasons. Second, of course, thank you to USIP for hosting this event, I'm very pleased to be here and hope that this continues the dialogue here and also finally and most importantly, my gratitude to HRNK for supporting this work and the research that we have been conducting under this aegis, but also to have the opportunity to publish a report that really is a compendium of work that we've been engaging in along the China-North Korea border and elsewhere for, this is dating me, two decades now. So I want to thank my authors, the names here, I won't read them all, but many colleagues who worked with me both in China, in South Korea and also with the analysis of the Korean language transcripts and interviews qualitative and reviewing a vast amount of literature both published in English and Korean. So it did involve a structured literature view, I won't get into the technicalities of that that's in the report in appendix at the end, but we did look as comprehensively and systematically as we could at the published literature on over the last, really, I think since 75. But mainly, of course, the publications on the crisis, the humanitarian crisis are post-90s or 80s, late 80s and 90s into the 2000s. We also did in-depth and key informant interviews, again, I won't get into the technical aspects, sample size and the rest, but we tried to talk with people who were both formerly North Korean children for ethical reasons. We chose not to interview North Koreans who were children at the time. We've done those interviews in the past, but in this case, people who were born in North Korea and had been children at some time during this generation, 1992, 2018, actually some of the interviews, I should say, were children born in China to North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers, and then others who had worked either in North Korea or in China or in South Korea providing support for North Korean children and get their insights as well. And then we re-analyzed and summarized work that we'd been doing on the border and in South Korea over a couple of decades, and some of this work has been published before, Frank mentioned the Lancet article, but some of this data is being published for the first time and I won't get into all the reasons, but our donors varied across the humanitarian landscape, NGOs, international entities, and there are sensitive issues here on going dynamics as those institutions engage with DPRK and with China and in an effort to protect their work, I chose not to acknowledge them publicly, although it's not to say I'm not grateful for the work and support and the necessary cooperation that we had with many colleagues and many people inside China as well, who of course must be, remain nameless. So our focus is on health and human rights over a period of a generation. The data are both qualitative and quantitative. We hope they're as comprehensive as we could provide. There may be gaps or maybe reports and data that we did not see. Obviously, please let me know. Research is an iterative process, but we want to emphasize that we have, I think, a strong database. It's by no means complete. There are many questions to be asked about how reliable are some of these data and I'll give it to some of the issues of bias, but I also want to point out that as a demographer, we think of generations as people born within a given timeframe or we may think about this as a kind of longitudinal process. Somebody born in 1955, like myself, I'm giving my age and we track that population over time and how do they fare. This is not that, this is not a longitudinal study. This is a cross-sectional study looking at anyone who was a child during this critical period. They might have been a child for one year. They might have been a child over the full duration. They might have been born and then died immediately because of nutritional deficits, infectious disease, and so forth. So we're talking about a lost generation as that kind of construct of populations. Two biases. And bias here doesn't necessarily mean somebody putting their thumb on the scale and manipulating. It simply means incomplete. And in some cases questionable. So data on North Korea is subject to control from within who can get data on populations who allows that data to be provided who may be reviewing the data and constraining full inclusion of populations or full analysis of the data we have. So we have to treat data coming from inside North Korea, whether from UN sources or others, as subject to scrutiny and caution. And leave it at that maybe to be picked up on later. Second, when we have data of people who've left, that's not a random sample. It simply isn't. People who leave are different from people who stay behind. They may be different because they're healthier. They can survive the rigors of the journey. They may be closer to the China border. Many of our sample were heavily weighted toward Hamgyong Pukdo, Northern Hamgyong. So there's biases, selection factors. And there's also a factor that may say, given the risk of the journey, you're not as likely to leave if things are sort of moderately okay. You may be capturing a population of people who are at greater risk of abuse or have experienced worse health outcomes and are fleeing more human rights outcomes and are fleeing to escape. So for those reasons, interviewing people in China, interviewing people in South Korea, give us certainly a, we hope, a representative view of people who leave and their experiences. But it's complicated, and I would say we would use caution to extrapolate and say we've interviewed these hundreds of people or thousands of people in China. That's what the profile is of North Koreans inside their country. So these two biases, which unfortunately don't cancel each other out. So I just wanted to make that point. We're not illegal scholars. This is not a legal analysis. We have certainly shared our findings with all entities as appropriate, sometimes through HRNK, but prior to this work in other contexts with UN bodies and others who were engaged in human rights inquiries. But this is not a specific indictment vis-a-vis individual cases of violation. So please don't treat this as a legal analysis, but that said, we do believe the findings from our own work and the research we've analyzed do support the basic findings of the commission on inquiry that North Korea has been engaged systematically in crimes against humanity and the children have suffered egregiously and certainly as vulnerable populations quite specifically. And that this ongoing lack of access to adequate care remains also a violation. And this goes to the progressive realization of rights and core obligation of human rights to adequate standards of living and the right to health. I don't think this group needs a map, but here it is. I don't know if I have a pointer, but our research was mainly up in the Yanban area, went out beyond that after some years and looks somewhat disproportionately people closer to the China-North Korea border. That's who's leaving. If you look at people who are in South Korea, about 30,000 plus a broader distribution, but again, not a representative sample of the North Korean population, I'll leave it there. And if we reference specific provinces, hopefully you'll just either remember the map or you know this stuff already. I don't know if you can see all of this from a distance, but this is our data showing a high mortality and spiking around 97, 98, the peak, we would say of the famine mortality. The peak of the famine by all accounts was the worst years that North Koreans were suffering during the famine years during the really acute phase of what's called the sometimes the arduous march, the Konani Hengun. Also a clear signature and consistent with many other famine data, declining fertility. Now why does fertility decline? Women become an ovulatory, a menorrheic and people choose not to have children. Why would you bring a child into the world when they will face high risk of death due to starvation or rise in infectious disease? And then we have the other curve of out migration. It's a trailing indicator, it's not the first thing people do in a famine. The first thing you do is hunker down, try to survive, eat what you have, borrow from neighbors. But then if things remain dire, you start to move about. And this is where we began to see people moving in larger numbers toward the China, North Korea border and across. So the peak of arrivals we'll get into this later was probably around 98, not 95, 96. And it's also subject to varying kinds of modulations in North Korean security at the border, Chinese security at the border and so forth. And here's some UN data that shows much the same thing. Infant mortality, neonatal mortality, child mortality, and we'll get into the technical interpretations of those data, but we see again around 98 was the peak of the elevated mortality that rose from a sort of, if you will, baseline of around 1990 and then began to decline and come down. But several people have asked me specifically and the general question is how reliable are these declines? We can see fairly evidently there was significant mortality increase during the peak of the famine and just after. But how about through 2000s and 2010, 2015, now 2020, are these declines real? The short answer is I don't know. Are these explainable and plausible under certain models and assumptions or interpretations? Yes, and others? No, not so much. So key findings is that mortality went up. I won't get into all of the numbers. Demographers and others like to sort of engage vigorously in debate about is it 600,000, is it a million, is it 300,000 over how many years and who was at risk and which particular age group suffered more acute increases in mortality? Suffice it to say that this was a devastating blow to the North Korean population. And you can see one of the interpretations would have meant equivalently, even in lower estimates, 7 million US population dying in the same interval if those rates applied to this country. Here are some other rates of childhood malnutrition and stunting wasting. And again, I won't get into the details because I want to leave time for a discussion. And it's in the report, but we can see higher levels of malnutrition and acute wasting beginning to decline. Stunting, which is more longer term developmental metrics declining less acutely, but they are going down. But they are going down. So one might say the good news is that these rates are going down, we're seeing improved health of children over time. I would argue whether we believe these implicitly or only in part or maybe don't really accept them at all, even if we accepted them in whole, the cost, the generational impact of 1990 to 2018 is present, it's evident and it's measured in higher mortality, higher morbidity, i.e. infectious disease, chronic conditions, and in many of some of the unmeasurable dimensions of lack of access to quality education, quality healthcare, quality of life in terms of adequate food, nutrition, shelter, and the like. So that's a lost generation, even if we took these numbers at face value. But what if they're higher than this? That's our open question. So nutrition and health, again, the data from our research and also borne out by a number of studies and they're all subject to critique over a period of time, again show elevated levels of wasting and stunting and malnourishment among children. And interesting, and here I think I would point out, bullet point two, some of the data, even from UN sources, show higher and rising disparities. So if you look at Pyongyang health, it's gonna be very different and maybe increasingly different from Yangtze, which is on the border more remote, more rural, more subject to loss of industrial industry, heavy industry in that area of the country. So disparities matter. Don't look just at national level data, whether you're looking at North Korea or any place, China, US, South Korea, what have you, look at the disparities and I think the data are pointing toward rising disparities. So if you might say, and some do, there's good news, GDP is rising, trade is rising, income levels are rising. The question then is for whom? For everybody across the board, that's not true anywhere in the world and it's certainly not true in North Korea and the data tend to bear that out. We also looked at vulnerable populations, children in orphanages or institutional care, children who are unaccompanied separated, children in prisons and so forth. I won't get into all that data, but here's just a few points that prior to 1980, institutional care was limited, but it began to rise in the 90s and institutionalization of children, particularly infamously, the so-called Gochebi population, the flower sparrows moving about transient, streetless, street children, homeless children, began to show up more and more in some of our data as being detained in nine to seven camps and so forth. So the rise in institutionalization of children and generally anyone dealing with child protection, institutionalization is the wrong way to go. Keep children with families is the new mantra that has not been happening in North Korea, according to our data and some other sources. This is a quote of one child in an orphanage and again I think time prevents me from reading it, but these are some very striking stories and personal reflections of what they survived and the fact that often they were placed in orphanages and their health got worse. They were subject to starvation diet, they were forced to work on work details and they of course were prevented in some cases or unable to reconnect with any family members they might have, these were not all orphanages so don't misunderstand the term orphanage as including people only children who had lost both parents. Many had relatives but were detained for various reasons, probably more due to security, population control and then child labor, lots of our data showed clear evidence over this period of time of forced child labor, whether that's work details that they engaged in as a function of their school activities, go out at lunch and work on heavy construction on the roads or filling in for their parents or other family members when it was required that somebody from the family engage in a neighborhood work unit, the child was often the only available person and so was forced to engage in this labor which again violates a number of human rights findings treaties and obligations. Unaccompanied separated children, this is a quote that talks not only about being unaccompanied but being at risk as a girl where in some cases was even forced to engage in transactional sex by other children, boys was sort of pimped out if you will and was trying to hang on and stay and forced to engage in some of these activities because she was herself responsible for a younger brother. So these stories are really quite heartbreaking and frequent and we had many conversations with children of these kinds of experiences at the China North Korea border and others insides in South Korea. Refugees and migrants which is really sort of my wheelhouse that's what I do for a living have done for many decades and our studies began in the winter of 1998. We got to Yen Ben and we were able to maintain various kinds of research projects from 98 to basically about 2013 and we'll show you some of those data over time tracking human rights problems like deportation, mistreatment of children and others women, trafficking, forced marriage, sexual abuse and so forth and also what the numbers were, politics of numbers, how many people died is one question, how many North Koreans were there or are there now in China? We have tried to bring empirical research methodologies to this question and again I won't present all of those data. Here are some data that we showed. We had a sentinel surveillance tracking monthly movements of people asking some of our colleagues in the Korean Chinese community, I won't name them, of course I cannot, 10 sites and asking them each month how many people arrive from North Korea, how many people leave, left either voluntarily to other places that you're aware of, how many people were arrested and deported and you can see these trend lines over time from 98 all the way to in this case to 2008. We had to stop this sentinel surveillance round about the time the Olympics happened and everything was sort of swept clean. To Chinese call it yenda campaign, a strike hard campaign struck us and we essentially had to abandon our monitoring. Here now we have arrest rates, people who were reported by community informants and I hear you used the word informant in a social science way, these were not spies and spooks and anybody other than community folks who had reason to know about these kinds of movements and what was happening in the way of arrest and deportations and you can see these spikes very well calibrated to the first instance when North Koreans entered, I think it was the Spanish embassy in Beijing and suddenly the police were out in force at the border. I was actually in China at that very time, we got a call saying get to ground, get to cover, tell all your friends and colleagues, stop any activities with North Koreans and there was a huge campaign to crack down, arrest and deport and it spiked again in 2008 around the time that there was clean up around the Olympics. How am I doing on time? I think we're almost at 20 minutes, I just- Okay, so let me try to wrap this up. So I won't get into the data on our population measures, let me go to recommendations. I will again say the data are here that show some of the costs of older abilities of children separated from their mothers and fathers in China, born in China to North Korean mothers and fathers. Here's some data on South Koreans in, excuse me, North Koreans in South Korea. You can see the trend lines, key point, arrivals are way down since Kim Jong-un came to power and likely to remain so and the profile of male female is, really has been since about 2004 or so increasingly female and we can get into the wise and clear force of that. So I'll simply say North Korea needs to both act to ensure adequate access to care and a transparent monitoring of the same, commit to rebuilding the primary health system which was once quite strongly effective in the 60s and 70s, grant access to the High Commissioner for Refugees and other rapporteurs on human rights. I am not making these recommendations because I think they're immediately plausible. I am making them because I think they're necessary and we stand behind them. China as well, grant access to UNHCR and others to monitor conditions of vulnerable populations in China and end the practice of deportation of North Koreans back to their country and provide temporary residence which may lead to permanent residence and enfranchisement in the Chinese polity. And then finally for the US, support humanitarian assistance with accountability, resettle refugees. We've resettled five North Koreans here since 2016. Surely we can do better than that and review its commitments in terms of humanitarian aid and protection of vulnerable populations both outside the country, North Korea and inside. And finally, for all of us really, promote, engage and accountability to these basic protection measures that are well-codified in international UN law and treaty law. We have the metrics, we have the framework I should say, we don't have good metrics and we need to stay engaged and promote further access and appropriate durable solutions, not only for those who are leaving but for the population who are being behind. So I'll stop there and thank you again. Sorry if I went over time. Again, thank you so much and I apologize for cutting short a very, something that we could spend many days and weeks talking about. Fortunately, there are copies of the report in the back, so please pick up a copy and I'll give you an opportunity to read more on your own time. So I'll introduce the panelists. We've already introduced Greg, but we have Roberta Cohen and please correct me if any of this information is outdated but Greg already mentioned that you're a co-chair emeritus of the Board of Directors of ATRONK, a former deputy to the Secretary of State for Human Rights, expert on humanitarian human rights issues related to internally displaced people and also on emergency aspects, emergency situations. And then we have Dan Jasper who's a public education and advocacy coordinator for Asia for the American Friends Services Committee. His work focuses on humanitarian peace building and people-to-people aspects of U.S.-North Korea relations. So each of you have about 10 minutes to speak and we will start with Roberta. No, just talking to it. Thank you, Frank and thank you to USIP for hosting. I was very eager to read the report of Court Robinson because I'd come across his scholarship in the past and I was impressed by his meticulous research, his objectivity and his integrity in reporting on humanitarian issues. In the year 2000, UNHCR and the Brookings Institution with which I was then affiliated held a conference in Bangkok on forced displacement in Asia. And UN and NGO representatives from all the affected Asian countries came to the conference except for North Korea. The aid workers there said that the subject displacement was too sensitive, urged me to take North Korea off the agenda and added that there were no internally displaced persons in North Korea. Clearly, the compromises required for providing aid were getting in the way of uncovering the situation on the ground. I contacted Court Robinson because he often went to the border and he said there were displaced people in North Korea because of the famine and he agreed to speak and to publish his findings in a UNHCR journal. Although he too had a way as decision, he came down on the side of bringing information forward so that the plight of North Korea's people could be known. Today's report, Lost Generation, again finds Robinson performing a service for the North Korean people by documenting in as much as he and his team can the health and human rights situation of North Korea's children over the past 30 years. His point of departure is the great famine of the mid-90s and as he has himself summarized, the report shows that too many children needlessly died of starvation or disease and that the physical and the psychological impact on those who survived was long lasting. Medical problems for the rest of their lives, countless numbers orphaned or homeless or severely traumatized. Now as for the causes, Robinson does not endorse the North Korean government explanation which I actually heard at the World Food Program in Rome in 2000. The explanation that weather was the sole cause of the famine. While the report does not deny the role of weather, it points to North Korean government policies and practices as contributing heavily to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. For the first time last year, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the DPRK called on North Korea to provide reparation for the survivors of the famine. No international tribunal to date has prosecuted any leader around the world for famine but international lawyers are looking how to link established international crimes to famine. Should any action be taken in the future on North Korea, the information in the Robinson report will provide a good foundation. The report goes on to describe the protracted humanitarian crisis in North Korea since the famine which continues to this day to affect the physical and intellectual development of North Korea's children. Significant numbers of youth are among the 43.4% of the population that the UN estimates to be malnourished in North Korea. As court noted, the percentage of stunting has reportedly gone down to one in five children. But he candidly adds in the report that stunting has gone down in Pyongyang, the favorite capital, not in all vulnerable areas of the country. Children in substantial numbers suffer limited access to healthcare, medicines, and clean water, especially in rural areas. And they're subjected, as he was telling you, to compulsory labor at state farms and construction projects affecting their health. And if a child comes from a politically undesirable family, the discriminatory Sangbun classification system erodes chances for a good education, housing, employment, and other services. Let me note that one of the finders and authors of the Sangbun system is in the audience, Helen Louise Hunter, and anyone interested in Sangbun might want to talk with her after the meeting. Who are the most vulnerable children? Court was identifying orphans, child laborers, child victims of trafficking, children in detention, unaccompanied and separated children, including street children, and to these groups he adds child migrants and refugees born to North Korean women in China who are in a precarious situation. Now most of these vulnerable categories are not acknowledged by the North Korean government, except for orphans and sometimes disabled children. As a result, UN humanitarian agencies in their programs appear to have to follow the government's lead in overlooking many of the especially vulnerable children. The UN's annual Needs and Priorities document on North Korea and the UNICEF North Korea government survey do not refer to the vulnerable children identified in the Robinson report. And I doubt that the UN Population Fund census with the government will list them either. Yet UN General Assembly resolutions each year specifically list the most vulnerable children in North Korea. In the resolution, they talk of returned or repatriated children, street children, children whose parents are detained, children in detention, children in institutions, children in conflict with the law and so forth. To what extent do aid agencies try to collect information about these categories of children and inquire of the government about their well-being? Aid agencies have long feared that raising the plight, especially of vulnerable children, could antagonize the North Korean authorities, possibly lead to their expulsion and undermine aid to other children at risk. But the agencies should be aware that North Korea for the first time last year accepted in a UN human rights process called the Universal Periodic Review, North Korea accepted the recommendation and I'm going to quote it that it, quote, grant immediate free and unimpeded access to international humanitarian organizations to provide assistance to the most vulnerable groups, including prisoners. This could certainly be an entry point for requesting access to especially vulnerable children, including child prisoners. Agencies no doubt want to avoid looking back later and regretting what they didn't do. In 1989, the International Committee of the Red Cross looked into why it had provided so little help to those in German death camps during the Second World War. And it found that at the time, the staff and officials were afraid that any advocacy might jeopardize their assistance to other groups like prisoners of war.  I believe that humanitarian agencies today in North Korea have the responsibility to find out as much as they can about the plight of children and also adults in acutely vulnerable situations as outlined in the Robinson Report and strategize about what, if anything, they can do to help them. Humanitarian and human rights groups should be working together, at least privately, to get the most vulnerable children on the agenda. The UN's Right's Up Front approach, this was introduced by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2014, calls for human rights and humanitarian collaboration in situations where serious violations are involved. Finally, a word about the report's recommendation that the international community address the impact of sanctions and resume large-scale humanitarian aid to North Korea. I agree with that. But I also agree with the report's recommendation that the North Korean government has certain responsibilities. One, to ensure the proper monitoring of aid to reduce diversion. Second, to ensure nondiscriminatory access to aid. Three, to give aid workers free movement so that they can collect data independently and communicate with beneficiaries and experts privately. Four, to increase their own investment in healthcare and agriculture to make aid sustainable. And five, to prioritize the most vulnerable children and adults who constitute the most acute cases of hunger and disease in the country. These issues need to be brought to the fore and negotiated with North Korea. Addressing them would make for a much more credible and more readily supportable aid process as the report emphasizes engagement should not come at the expense of upholding humanitarian and human rights standards. Thank you, Roberta. Let's turn to Dan, who has a lot of experience working with the North Korean government on some of these sensitive issues. So we'll have a unique perspective from Dan. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. And I actually appreciate that you had this conversation on a Friday. It's very heavy material. Best we didn't do it on a Monday. I really appreciated the report. And really quickly before I jump into my comments, I just want to say a quick word about what we do in North Korea. The American Friends Service Committee actually has for what we work with for cooperative farms in the country to improve conservation agricultural techniques. So we've had that partnership now for almost 40 years. We've worked in the country since 1980, and we were actually the first U.S. organization to enter the country. Originally, we were doing people-to-people exchanges. And in the mid-90s, when the famine began to hit hard, we have reports from our staff members that actually they were surprised a little bit by the partners who suddenly said, you know, we want to show you some things and we would appreciate your support as we try to alleviate the situation. So that juncture actually changed the nature of our program from one of people-to-people exchanges to one of addressing food security in the country. This is something that we've understood to be wrapped up in the larger conflict on the peninsula and something that we could address immediately and help build bridges between Koreans and Americans. We're not a humanitarian organization. We're, well, we do humanitarian work, but by and large, we're a peace-building organization. Our practice is based off of Quaker Values. It's actually a Quaker organization. And Roberta mentioned the ICRC's work with or regret over Germany's, or the incidents in Germany. We had a very different approach in that moment, and actually it's one that we're very proud of. We engaged in Eastern Europe with a number of camp administrators, and we were able to secure the release of 40,000 Jews in Eastern Europe. So we have a different approach, and I wholeheartedly agree with Roberta Cohen that our communities have a lot to be in conversation about and a lot to learn from each other, and I think that we can really sort of improve upon our work by having these types of conversations. So I really appreciate that. I know that we're kind of short on time, but I wanted to make four points and sort of circle them around, one, the context in which we view this data. Two, talk a little bit about the data and how it's regarded today and how that sort of creates a picture of the current context. Three is about the recommendations, and then four I'll just have a quick word about the humanitarian work in the DPRK. The first, excuse me. So the first comment is about the context in which we view this. The report did a really good job, I thought of sort of spreading out the context and trying to take a historical look at the different factors that we're playing out in the country. My encouragement to all of us is to expand our context just a little bit further than the Korean War. Often I think Americans start in 1953 in understanding North Korea, but in some respects I think that makes sense because the border solidified and things started to stabilize a little bit, but more often than not, I think we really need to understand this country as far back as Japanese colonialization. I don't want to go into a huge historical lesson, but I think that's really incredibly important because North Korea understands human rights within the context of independence and sovereignty. I feel, and our organization feels very strongly that we can make improvements so long as we have conversations that are less about imposing standards and more about working with to improve standards. That might seem like a subtle distinction, but it's a very important one, especially for the North Koreans. Actually last time I was in Pyongyang, I meandered into a bookshop and I found this series called Understanding Korea, and one of the books is actually Human Rights. So I thought that was really interesting, obviously I had to buy that book. And the first, you know, they're broken into sections, numbered sections, and the first section I think is probably worth reading. It's very short. It's kind of complicated, but I think it's worth reading. It says, number one, the DPRK's view on human rights. The DPRK views the human rights as the rights of the man to independence, that the masses of the people are the genuine personification of human rights, and that human rights are precisely the rights of a nation. That's kind of complicated. I won't go into deconstructing that, but I think there's three main concepts we can pull from that. It's one, the relationships between the state, the person, and groups of individual, and they see the expression of human rights being as the collective. That might be very different from how we view it, but it's important as we engage in conversations with North Korea that we understand that as the context in which they view it. I think that's very helpful in moving these conversations along. I would also note that the ongoing war is something that AFSC is very concerned with and views as being integral to the human rights situation. The division of the Korean Peninsula, in our view, I think is almost, would be akin to dividing an ecosystem in half. It's almost like the Civil War in the U.S. where the South was traditionally agrarian, the North was traditionally industrious. Today, dividing the peninsula in North Korea does not actually have enough arable land to feed its people, so there are some physical constraints that we face. Again, I don't say any of this in defense of anything, but it's just important context that we keep in mind as we go forward. And I would say that, you know, there's many elements within the report that note a sort of war-like mentality, and that is the first thing that I think I understood going to the DPRK was that this country is under siege. They really do view themselves at war. The report discussed some of the many assignments for children who were required to get scrap metal and things like that. They're also mobilized to work on farms and things like that. That, to me, is very reminiscent of a war culture, of a war economy, right? They're mobilizing all the labor they can. And so that's incredibly important as we think through some of these recommendations and how do we go about improving the situation? We do need to take... We do need to consider the ongoing war as part of this. And just in interest of time, I'll move along. I want to quickly just note that the data... The data was incredibly interesting, and I was very impressed by all of this collection. In fact, I had no idea it was going on. It's probably by design, I think. But it was very good to see. And I think what I saw was that there are two sort of... We're entering a post-famon era, and I think that, you know, Cortland noted that we're not quite sure if that is reflective of the true situation in the country. I would say anecdotally, just from our experience, that does seem to sort of jive with what we see in the country. There does seem to be an improvement from about 2008 to 2010. We see indicators start to reach the pre-famon levels. And I think that by and large, I would guess that most of the humanitarian community would agree with me when I say that there were a lot of improvements in certain indicators up until about 2017. I don't really have the data after 2017 to make any bold claims about it, but I would be very surprised if the increase in sanctions did not have an impact on some of these indicators. There's been all sorts of disruptions, and I will leave that for the Q&A, but I'm happy to go into the types of challenges we've faced as humanitarian actors since the new round of sanctions starting in 2017. Quickly, I just want to note on the recommendations part, I think your recommendations were very well thought out. There's a couple of things that I just wanted to note. One is for the UN, I think the UN is perhaps one of the most underutilized resources, I think, in this conflict, and certainly we lean on them for the human rights concerns, and Roberta spoke a little bit about the humanitarian issues, but I think by and large, we do need to see them as a bridge. I think that the recommendation for the special repertor on DPRK I think is actually really spot on, and I would say that it may not be as far out of a thought as maybe we view it as currently, but the context in the climate does need to be of one where I think things need to stabilize in terms of U.S. DPRK relationship before that becomes more viable. For the U.S., I really appreciate you noting the sanctions and the letter to Trump, having been the chief author of that, it was very appreciative of the shout out there, and I think it's, again, it's really spot on, and the idea that the U.S. needs to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council is, of course, very important. I presume that the reason we're recommending that is so that the U.S. can raise these issues at the Human Rights Council. I don't think it was spelled out, but it was sort of assumed, and I think that's right, and I think that with regards to the recommendations to uphold standards on child rights, we need to apply that as well to the United States. I think we're facing a lot of issues at the border. I would be extremely surprised if the North Koreans were not aware of what was happening at the U.S.-Mexican border and weren't willing to use that in terms of negotiations and sort of to dismiss the U.S.'s engagement on this. So it is something that we need to be aware of and apply within our own country. For the international community, I was very pleased to see the mention of the Global Fund and the tuberculosis crisis. This was something that had a lot of people very worried. I think right now, in the context of the coronavirus, we're seeing what global security issues are presented by these types of health issues. Tuberculosis has a very high rate within the country. I think it has the fifth highest rate in the world. Last time I looked at the data, they have a drug-resistant form of the disease as well. When they're not treated, when that drug pipeline is disrupted, we're incubating that within the country, and it's going to pop around to South Korea, China. That stuff doesn't respect national boundaries. I was very pleased to see that in there as well. Lastly, I'll just quickly mention that the humanitarian issues, I hope that we can see these as bridges. I think it was noted within the report as well that these conversations are perfect ways in which we can have these conversations. The FSC, we've had many conversations about reaching the most vulnerable. How do we do that? We actually choose the most vulnerable farms that we work with, so we go far outside of Pyongyang. We don't just work with the top producing farms. We don't work with model farms. We work with those in need. We do present opportunities, I think, to have other conversations as well, to reach more vulnerable conversations, but it does require, I think, an international commitment to seeing that these bridges aren't impacted by things like sanctions and the ongoing war. I know I went on for a little bit along there, but I think I can leave it there. Thank you, Dan, for your perspective, and hopefully we can pick up on some of the threads of conversations that you raised, and then let's finish up with Greg. Well, thank you very much, and Dan, thank you for mentioning the Human Rights Council. Of course, you'll remember the UN Commission of Inquiry report of February 2014, a report that found that the North Korean regime commits crimes against humanity, against its own people. The report further recommended that the DPRK case be submitted to the attention of the International Criminal Court. Yes, there is a state of war on the Korean Peninsula, and that state of war is the direct result of the June 25th, 1950 invasion of South Korea by Kim Il-sung with the support of Joseph Stalin. I agree, Dan, regrettably there is still an armistice in place, no peace treaty. I was born and raised in communist Romania. I lived there for 19 years. For those of you who don't know it, I'm deeply grateful to Roberta Cohen, one of the many wonderful things she has done. Well, this was happening during the Cold War, Soviet dissidents including Andrei Sakharov and read to them passages from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights documents that the Soviet Union had ratified by its people had no access to his documents. We didn't. Similarly, North Korea is bound by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a UN member state, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Women's Convention, the Children's Convention, the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and yet North Korea, the North Korean regime, hides behind this notion of collective rights and complies with none of its international obligations. It complies with none of the obligations it assumes under its own constitution, which its own people cannot really see. Human rights, freedom of speech, religious freedom, these are all human rights actually included on paper in the very constitution of the DPRK. My first job after the fall of communism in Romania and over 1,000 young people died bringing down that regime, I hope that if they knew that I'm here today with Dan, with Cort, with Roberta, Frank and all of you, we know that be happy and they'd say that their sacrifice was well worth it because we're still trying to address this very difficult case of North Korea. Back in the day, my first job was to drive around the country with a team of the British Red Cross. We had had it really bad in the provincial town where I had grown up, Buzo Romania, capital of European culture and civilization. I'm joking. We got to travel to the countryside and see, under privileged communities, Roma's, the humanitarian conditions and the human insecurity was absolutely mind-boggling, catastrophic and we thought we had had it bad. It was unbelievable, even to a person who had lived inside the country. So I can only imagine how terrible it must be in North Korea for those vulnerable groups that no one remembers. And as Roberta said, our organization, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, has been very keen on urging a human rights upfront approach to North Korea. Let me address very quickly a fundamental attribution error. We are not against humanitarian assistance, just because of a human rights organization. If you look at court's report, the report urges that funding be made available to humanitarian operations provided that adequate transparency, monitoring, evaluation are insured. This is also one of the ten commandments of our organization, the ten recommendations submitted to the U.S. government. Yes, yes and yes. We are in favor of responsible, fully monitored, evaluated, transparent humanitarian assistance that reaches those who need it most, the most vulnerable groups in North Korea. Of course, we have addressed people in detention for many years. Since 2001, we have mapped out North Korea's detention facilities, including unlawful detention facilities. You have this map up on the screen. This is a masterpiece by none other than our one and only Rosa Park, who's here today, my deputy, director of public affairs, editor. So this is a map of detention facilities in North Korea, included in the recent book by Professor Lee Cheong-min on Kim Jong-un and the soon-to-be-published book by Dr. Cheong Park, Korea Chair at the Brookings Institution. No, they're not giving me commissions to advertise their books. You will see dots on the map. Look at the northernmost dot in the upper northeastern corner of North Korea. That is the Cheong-gori re-education through labor camp. We had been interviewing North Korean escapees who told us that a lot of women forcibly repatriated from China had been imprisoned there. Now, as you all know, that is a flagrant violation of the 1951 convention UN Convention concerning the status of refugees because their return to a place where they face a credible fear of persecution, they should be allowed access to the process granting them political refugee status. That doesn't happen. They end up not only in political prison camps, but also in Kyu-ha Seoul re-education through labor camps. So the witnesses told us that 80% of the 1,000 women, 800 of them imprisoned there were actually forcibly returned North Korean women, forcibly returned from China. And they told us that so many of them had been imprisoned that a new annex had been built. We were able to verify this through satellite imagery. Then come Typhoon Lion Rock in August 2016. Roberta Colesby says, well, couldn't we acquire some satellite imagery and see what's going on in North Korea? Bill Bermudez, our senior consultant, acquires satellite imagery. The only place we could see was Kyu-ha Seoul number 12, Cheong-gorye. We had cloud cover all over North Korea. So we knew that the UN was conducting a rapid assessment in the area. We established that this facility was also flooded. So we wrote to the UN right away. We ran a rapid assessment and told them, you're running this rapid assessment, how about going just next door where 800 women political prisoners forcibly repatriated by China are imprisoned. The UN was very quick to respond. The deputy secretary general at the time in Eliason rode to us right away on the ground. They did nothing. Thus, the efforts continue. I could go through the list. We have worked with satellite imagery and open source information. We have documented the proximity of UN and privately funded humanitarian operations to 25 detention facilities in North Korea. Please bear with me for just a few seconds. If you look just north of Pyongyang, you look at the South Pyongyang province, Kyu-ha Seoul number one. There were operations in the immediate proximity of this facility run by WFP, UNICEF, UNFPA, IFRC, NGOs, Korean Sharing Movement, GAP International, World Vision, Sandcare, Korea Peace Sharing Foundation, Child Fund Korea, Food for the Hungry, and the list goes on and on and on for 25 facilities. So we are firmly in favor of humanitarian assistance. We must be supportive of these wonderful humanitarian efforts in North Korea, and the only way to proceed moving ahead is to factor in vulnerable groups, the human rights factor, people in detention, women, children, escapees who go across the border. So I'm going to say this just one more time. We are firmly in support of these humanitarian initiatives. Of course, we're always worried about diversion to the regime loyalists and to the military. But if you're talking, for example, about a multi-drug resistant tuberculosis program that Steve Linton and other wonderful people are running in North Korea, what diversion can happen in that case? Who can be against that type of program? So, again, talking about people-to-people exchanges, there is a lot of work to do. And moving ahead, I do look forward to closer cooperation between human rights and humanitarian organizations. We have to get beyond this fundamental attribution error that human rights organizations are just keen on regime change and are against humanitarian assistance. That is not the case. And the HRNK report by Dr. Court Robinson and HRNK's own 10 fundamental recommendations to the U.S. government are a testament to that. By the way, please allow me to engage in a shameless act of self-promotion. Please do visit HRNK.org. Please do friend us on social media and follow us. It will be a great way to keep an eye on our publications, activities, and everything else we're doing. Again, a great pleasure being with all panelists here today. Thank you. Thank you, Greg, especially for highlighting the serious human rights issues and the issue of the prison camps that I don't think was addressed as much in the report. So we have about 20 minutes left or so, and I want to make sure that we get to audience questions. So I have lots of questions, but I'll just limit it to one, and I think anyone can answer. Dr. Robinson, you raised a great point about focusing on the plausibility or the practicality of some of these recommendations in the report. And so one of the recommendations is about getting greater transparency and access on things like human rights and humanitarian concerns from North Korea and China, and then stopping deportations of North Koreans back to North Korea from China. I guess my question is, we've been asking for these things for at least 20 years, and we always come up against the hurdle because for China, for North Korea, it's not in their interest, at least from their perspective, from their perception to engage on these issues. How can we persuade these countries to engage on the humanitarian and human rights issues in a way that they feel like it's in their interest? For example, one potential way might be through a Helsinki approach where we want them to engage on human rights and humanitarian issues, but in return, they essentially get something that they want. That was the case in Eastern Europe when we basically allowed them to have the territorial consolidation and the security conference and economic trade that the Soviet bloc wanted in return for a human rights basket. So the broader question is, how do we practically get North Korea and China to engage on the recommendations that we make? Excellent question. I am not a political scientist. I am a public health practitioner. I think one way to sort of square this circle, if you will, and think about what's the human rights up front approach versus the engagement. Some called it protest versus presence, and this is an ongoing dilemma in the humanitarian community, whether you're working on the Thai-Kinbodean border and working in Khmer Rouge-run camps or wherever else it is, are you representing the needs of the population and how do you square that against political ideological motives from donors, governments, and so forth? The public health model says public health is not only health, access to health, right to health is a human right, but public health can be really an important both bridge builder but also form of engagement. I wasn't raised Quaker, my family is Quaker, speak truth to power is what we were taught. Whether you're in the abolitionist movement back in the 17, 1900s or present day, how do you do that in a way that keeps them at the table? Because if they walk away or start throwing things at you or shooting at you, you might say, well, we've still had to do that. That's what protest is about. But it's also a matter of how do you provide a way to persuade, engage with a counterpart and help them see that is in their self-interest. As Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, self-interest rightly understood, said racism is a threat to everybody, including the racists. Human rights violations are a threat to everybody and they're a health threat. And if you engage and promote global funds, support for TB, MDRTB, XDRTB, this is a very serious public health crisis. Coronavirus is an emerging one. To say we want to engage with you, we want to support the work that promotes the health of the North Korean population and provides support for all of the North Korean population, including the most vulnerable, and is done consistently with human rights treaty instruments. There is a middle ground. There is a common ground. And I do believe as much, and I talked about the implausibility, yes, we've been sort of knocking on this door or banging on this door, engaging in ways in for many, many decades. But that doesn't mean you stop because we simply have to give up and move on. We have to remain engaged. And I was very pleased to work with HRNK. I knew it about them, that they were for humanitarian aid, but with accountability. All of us are for that. There's not a single person in the humanitarian community who says just throw stuff out there, drop it from an airplane. Who cares where it goes? Everybody has internal and larger guidelines to talk about, accountability monitoring and so forth. I think public health and health support for health interventions can be a very important way to remain engaged, build trust, if you will, but trust with accountability and use that as a lever to once you've sort of brought the door open, say, we have other populations who may not be immediately in your sights and they include vulnerable children, street children, people in prisons and so forth. How about including them and how can we engage? So I think public health really is a model to find this common ground between people who say human rights up front and others who say we must remain present to the needs of the population. Let me just mention a few examples. Greg raised the case of Typhoon Lion Rock, the flooding of the reeducation through labor camp. North Korea had requested aid from the U.N. so it was in their interest to get that aid and they sat down with the U.N. agencies and actually did ask them, where do you want to go, what is your idea of all this? They never raised the reeducation camp. So even though headquarters, John Elias and the Deputy Secretary General seemed to be supportive of if they were to do so, they didn't do it. There's a great fear. The fear is generally of expulsion. If that's the humanitarian main message for itself, I don't think you'll get far. You've got to begin to put issues on the agenda. So that was one that I couldn't help but note. Tuberculosis must be another because tuberculosis is rife in the prison camps and according to the World Health Organization, if it's rife in the prison camps, that's a place they enter in other countries because it will help the whole community outside the prison camps. And so here you have a situation where TB should be an access to prisons on health grounds, should be something that is being pushed. It could be pushed at executive board meetings by other governments. So the request, the advocacy behind it, I don't know if it's always there because it's certainly in North Korea's interest to get a reduction in TB rates. And I think in other areas, you will see when they find it in their interest, they do something. When they wanted to summit in Singapore, they released the three American prisoners they had, including two who were at the Pyongyang University. Much earlier in 2002, they released Japanese abductees, not all of them, because they wanted certain political and economic benefits. I mean, it is important, which is suggesting, that one looks at how it's in their interest, but I think that the other side has to become more of a force in getting other governments and those that give aid to begin not to denounce and not to yell, but to just show the relationship between their interests and aid and how this is a bridge and it's important, but that we have certain standards too. I mean, I think it can be done if you really strategize a lot and there's some spine behind our side as well. Yeah. Well, thank you for that. I mentioned that AFSC does this work to be a bridge between Koreans and Americans and there's a saying that if you're going to be in a bridge, you're going to get walked on by both sides. And that's something that I think we certainly feel a lot in this context and I think that it's difficult because, you know, it's difficult because a lot of the conversations that we have are in confidence and there's a reason that we maintain that confidence for a whole host of reasons. So I wouldn't, you know, and I can't speak to the UN, but I wouldn't assume that just because there doesn't seem to be any progress in the round, that doesn't mean that there's not discussions taking place behind the scenes. One of the things that I point to is that just before 2017 in the new executive order and I wanted to say just before the Singapore summit as well, an organization and they're nameless, but they were able to get an MOU secured to treat prisoners within the camps for various health concerns. That was a huge gain and I think you're very right when you say public health is like a great bridge because that's something that we're all interested in. And so in the work that we do and that specific incidence tells me that it's not necessarily a matter of showing that it's within their interest, but it's a matter of building trust in order for them to be able to work with us in a way that's productive. Now, just after that MOU was signed, that's when a new round of sanctions came and that's when the U.S. government actually started to deny all permissions for humanitarian workers. They wouldn't let us travel. I think that was in 2018. So about a year after. That's when the North Koreans pulled back on that MOU. They pulled back on a lot of work and it wasn't necessarily a surprise to us. That was a fissure in partnerships that some organizations have been building for decades. And that's not easy work. I mean, it takes a lot of work and sometimes when you go there, it may seem like you're not making much progress, but every interaction that you have, every conversation that you have is moving the ball a little bit forward to improve things there. So I just want to sort of emphasize the fact that there is stuff being done behind the scenes, but a lot of it is dependent upon the larger climate of what's happening. I think the North Koreans, I mentioned the bridge thing, but it's probably an open secret that humanitarian organizations and work are often used as a telegraphing instrument between organizations and communities and usually countries. So when they see permissions being denied for U.S. humanitarian workers, I think the North Koreans read that as, okay, the U.S. is pulling back on some of the commitments they made. So I think at the timeline, the Singapore summit happened in June 2018. That fall, the U.S. government started to deny travel permissions for U.S. workers, started to deny applications to send aid. That shut down what had essentially been baseline level of engagement for 40 years. So after the U.S. had publicly committed to improving relations, quietly it had begun rolling back regulations that essentially broke down partnerships that had lasted for decades. That has huge consequences about how the North Koreans are reacting to U.S. engagement as well as international engagement as well. So I just want to throw that out there as well, that the larger context is a major factor in how much progress we can make on the ground. That's a great point about the mixed signaling that comes from the U.S. government. Okay, I apologize that we're running out of time, so let's go to audience questions. Please raise your hand, yourself and your affiliation, and please keep your question limited to a very quick question. So the lady in front right here. Hi, my name is Contessa Bourbon. I'm a journalist. Thank you for this very interesting forum. My question is, how do international crimes of North Korea impact famine? What are really the main causes of famine aside from drought? And how do you assess access to education for North Korean children? Great. Dr. Robinson, do you want to take that one? Yeah, there's a long answer and a short answer. I'd say some of this is discussed in the book. I think if you look back to the work of Amartya San, he talks about famines never occurring in democratic countries. That's actually proven not to be the case. But he uses the phrase entitlements. It doesn't mean entitlements like welfare and whatever. It has access to rights, rights to food, rights to adequate standard of living, rights to education. Generally we see in famines in the modern day that something is constrained. The government says no, we won't allow international food aid. We can take care of this ourselves or we will distribute the food aid according to our priorities. Or it's not a problem at all. Or it's only a problem of crop failure as a result of natural, recent natural disasters. So I would say just in the context of DPRK there was a fundamental unwillingness to recognize famine as famine. They wanted to call it a monglin munje. They wanted to use the flood relief distributed FDRC. I'm not getting the acronym quite right. And not simply to say, we have a famine. We have a large scale failure of the markets and the crop production system that has led to exacerbated and elevated levels of mortality and morbidity and as measured in malnutrition and many other metrics. Let's respond as best we can and bring in international food aid and provide full access to the population so we can alleviate. Had they done that, I think we would have seen measurable more rapid decreases in mortality. So when we say famine related deaths, SS deaths, of course people are going to die. We don't eliminate mortality. We want to eliminate that excess mortality. There's many other models and examples that show this that when government policies constrain, restrict aid for arguably their own political reasons and people die in excess of general mortality or in excess of what could have been prevented had aid been and other measures been rolled out effectively and immediately. Then we have that measurable gap between what could have lives that could have been saved, but were not versus lives that would never have been saved because it's just, there's just risk. There's risks that happens in floods and risks that happens in the context of crop failure. It's that gap in that middle gap that I think where we want to explore all the ways in which famines that perpetuate over time go back to human causality and human causality goes back to systems of governance among many other things. I think I'll leave it at that but I think it's well worth further exploring whether it's the North Korea famine or the China Great Leap famine or all of the other many ways in which food that would have been available in the world and not provided immediately and adequately and without sort of discrimination led to excess mortality of specific populations and that that I think can be attributed to policies either carried out or not carried out. Let's take two questions at a time. The gentleman back there and then BJ Reid. Hi, Phil Schrafer, retired international healthcare consultant. I'm amazed from Greg and Don that there are humanitarian organizations in North Korea who, given Russia's relation where they've kicked out I believe every NGO. Why does North Korea even let you in there? I'm just amazed you can function. And then next question from BJ. Hi, my name is BJ Choi from the George Washington University. Daniel, you mentioned about the North Korea has a different perception and perspective of human right, which is more like a collective banner while we do have like a more individual freedom base like human right perception. What is the way that we can just mitigate the kind of gap? I don't think we can expect North Korean regime just to accept our own perception of human right. So what are the ways that we can just really help them to like focus on individual freedom base, which they don't have that kind of perception so far? Yeah, two very good questions. I'll start with the question of why there were allowed to operate there. You know, I won't speak to what their motivations are, but it's right now, I think in terms of U.S. private NGOs, it's all faith-based organizations. It's all organizations that have the longevity to stick through a lot of the turmoil that plays out on the ground and in the context. We, again, it took a long time to build relationships and to build that trust. So I think that we're allowed to operate there now because of our long history and I think most organizations that are there do have a long history there, whether that's 10 years or 40 years. There is a recognition that these organizations are providing help and, you know, I'm happy to go into more details afterwards, but, you know, I won't speak to their motivations, but I think as I understand it, it's not well, they see the value in working with us and one of the things that we hear quite often is the sincerity that we bring and they say, you know, we thought Americans were all evil and then we start working with you and we see your genuine efforts to help improve our situation. So that in and of itself, I think, speaks to some of the engagement. To your question about how do we bridge the gap between the different conceptions of human rights, I think this is a really rich question. I think a lot of people have ventured to try to bridge that gap in the past. From my perspective, I would say that one of the things that we really need to understand is that this war is factoring into how the society is structured within North Korea. Everything really is considered to be for the state security apparatus, right? And that's not necessarily unique to North Korea. You'll find that in every state, that they're going to prioritize national security over the individual well-being of its citizens. Even the U.S. does that to some extent, right? In 2018 we passed the biggest military budget in history and we had a million Americans who were food insecure. So it's not necessarily unique to democracies, autocracies, whatever. You know, they're going to prioritize that. So in order for us to relieve some of that pressure, to understand that they're going to see human rights within the framework of sovereignty, we need to understand that this war does need to be addressed. It needs to be factored in. That doesn't say that, okay, if we solve the war, we get a peace treaty tomorrow, everything is going to be hunky-dory and fine. But it is a critical first step in acknowledging the situation of the country. And I see you're trying to come in. Oh, sure. Perhaps I could follow. Dan, I could answer your second question with another question. If there is a need to mitigate collective rights and individual rights in the DPRK, why is it that they include individual human rights in their own constitution? Again, on paper, these rights are embedded in the very fundamental documents of the DPRK. Regrettably, the very people of the DPRK do not have access to these documents. And do you remember the story of Chisong Ho, who's North Korean escapee, disabled, NGO leader, now running for the South Korean National Assembly? He's the one who appeared at the State of the Union address as a guest of the First Lady of Trump. And Chisong Ho was telling us, while he was being interrogated by the Ministry of Public Security, he recalls, having seen a copy of the DPRK criminal code hanging by a chain on the wall, stamped top secret. I think this is all we have to know about how legislation is actually applied to the actual people of North Korea. They simply don't know. They do have a right to know. And we do have a responsibility to enable them to know that they have a right to know the obligations that their own government has assumed. Pursuant to their own domestic legislation and pursuant to the international human rights documents that they have exceeded to. Thank you. Any further questions? Great. I'm getting out right on time. Please join me in thanking the speaker and our panelists.


Over the past two months, an increase in the number of cases of hand foot and mouth disease have been recorded. Based on the analysis of data received from the health care facilities, this trend was observed throughout August with increases in the month of September. It is not unusual to experience cases of hand foot and mouth disease at this time of the year, but studies show the correlation between increased incidence of this disease and heavy rainfall.  It affects mainly children within the age groups of 0 to 5 years, but can also affect older children and adults. The virus is spread from an infected person through their nose and throat secretions such as saliva, drool or nasal mucus, fluid from blisters or scarves, feces or poop, respiratory droplets when they cough or sneeze. Symptoms associated with hand foot and mouth disease include fever for 3 to 5 days, sore throat, decreased appetite and general unwell feeling, loose tools, skin rash which appears normally on the palms of the hands and fingers, soles of the feet and toes, upper buttocks and around the mouth. In some instances, the rash may only appear on the arms and legs. Hand foot and mouth disease is not a serious illness. It is usually mild and self-limited, but in certain instances the blisters in the mouth can lead to dehydration and hospitalization of the infected child. The disease normally resolves within 7 to 10 days. The disease is very contagious given its mode of transmission and the age group affected and can often lead to outbreaks within the educational settings. To prevent the spread of the disease, the importance of proper infection, prevention and control measures must be emphasized. Thorough washing of the hands with soap and water after using the toilet, before eating, after wiping noses and after changing nappies or soiled clothing. Avoid sharing cups, eating utensils, items of personal hygiene, for example towels, washers and toothbrushes and clothing, especially socks and shoes. Thoroughly wash with soap and water any soiled clothing or contaminated surfaces and toys. Additional disinfection of toys and surfaces with a diluted chlorinated solution should be practiced. Teach the children about practicing cough and sneeze etiquette. Cover their coughs and sneezes with their elbow or tissue. Dispose of used tissues in the bin and practice hand washing with soap and water afterwards. Educators, observe and be vigilant of any child presenting with signs and symptoms of hand, foot and mouth disease.  The sick child should not return to school until all the skin lesions have healed, usually within 7 to 10 days. Hand, foot and mouth disease can be caused by many viruses. Therefore, a child can become infected more than once. It is of paramount importance that we, parents and educators remain vigilant to allow the timely detection of new cases and institute the proper infection prevention and control measures to prevent further spread of these diseases. Let us continue to work together to ensure minimal disruptions in the school term and provide that safe environment our children need to thrive. The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs thanks you for your continued support as we continue to keep St. Lucia healthy and safe.


Good afternoon again. Good afternoon to all of you. My name is Tony Lamino. I just joined Erie recently, three weeks ago as head of communication. I was away from the country for 11 years. But primarily the mission of the organization is what convinced me and my family to come back. As mentioned earlier, and the chairman of the convener, Dr. Iro Nisila, picked up on something that president Pinoy in his message delivered by Secretary Alcala said about rice sciences for improving food products for the betterment of society. And that means nutrition, that means food security, that means broader impacts that Dr. Akim Dogerman spoke about earlier in his keynote. Economic development, sustainable development, such issues as inclusive inclusivity in social and economic areas. Anyway, I also would like to quote another president from a foreign country who said these new rice trains, the technical training you are giving which do more to escalate the war against hunger than anything that I know of that is being done today. Because if we are to win our war and the only important war that really counts if we are to win our war against poverty, against disease, against ignorance, against illiteracy and against hungry stomachs then we have to go to succeed in projects like this. Dundun B. Johnson in 1966 at the International Rice Research Institute just wanted to share that because that vision and that mission continues until today at IRI and with our partner organizations. So, with that sabi ko nga po bago lang po ako sa IRI when they ask if I would be willing to MC a session during this symposium I said that would be fantastic when they said it was GM Rice with some of the sharpest journalists in the country I said uh oh when they said don't worry these are very well informed articulate reporters and journalists I said thank you and in my mind they said that makes my life even more difficult but actually not really because I'm just here to moderate the session and please know that we are on a tight timeline so thank you very much again for joining us and we'll start without further ado. On our panel we have five individuals very well respected in their own fields and in the field of rice science and if I may just introduce them quickly the first to speak will be Clayton who is Public Relations Manager at IRI and the lead with her team who organized this particular session so thank you Tofi and your colleagues for making this possible So we manages a team who promotes and communicates IRI's rice research and its impact and benefits we also have Dr. Heil Young who is Principal Scientist and Program Leader, Genetic Diversity He is a Plant Pathologist and Geneticist with a primary interest in disease resistance and genetic diversity research Mr. Tam Navasaro is Senior Executive in leading start-up and publicly listed firms in the United States and Asia with a focus in turning around distressed assets and seeding growth He is the founding trustee of the Genomics Institute of Asia at the lab industries Dr. Akim Doberman is Deputy Director General for Research at IRI and he is a Soil Scientist and Agronomist with 25 years of experience working in Asia, North America and Europe and Dr. Antonio Alfonso who is the Coordinator of the Biotechnology Program at the Department of Agriculture is the current Coordinator at the Biotechnology Program and his research includes rice nutritional enhancement and improvement of resistance to drought and insect pests and diseases through conventional and non-conventional breeding methods So to start us off the Lead Organizer of this session PR Manager at IRI Ms. Sophie Clayton Thank you very much Tony Welcome everybody to Let's Talk GM Rice the media event of the 7th International Rice Genetics Symposium Rice genetics for those of you that don't know is a science behind understanding rice genes and is critical to developing new varieties of rice both GM and non-GM Since farmers first started cultivating rice and selecting their best performing rice to grow they have been changing the genetic composition of rice Today's rice breeders have much more sophisticated knowledge about rice genes and use that knowledge and modern ways to breed rice even better types of rice with a whole range of useful and beneficial characteristics The International Rice Genetics Symposium is all about understanding rice genes sharing that knowledge and using it to improve rice There is lots of fascinating rice genetic research that you can learn about across the symposium this week and I hope you all take the opportunity to go to the different sessions and talk to the scientists who are here to learn about their research The experts that's introduced already by Tony who can hopefully answer your questions specifically about GM rice and GM rice research at IRI and the Philippine Rice Research Institute I am not one of the experts on GM rice but part of my role is to help communicate what we are doing at IRI and why and we get lots of questions about GM rice At IRI we are committed to sharing all the wonderful science the institute does and communicating the impact rice research and the breeding of new rice varieties can have on reducing poverty and improving food security and rice consumers ourselves although maybe not at lunch today we know that the price of rice can directly impact our own lives If rice prices go up there's less money to buy other things But it's worse for those people who have the least When rice prices go up they can wreak havoc on these people's lives It may mean they can't afford other basics like a diversity of nutritious food and health care While we don't have farmers joining us today I would certainly encourage you to take the time to talk to a rice farmer sometime and you can talk to me or my team if you want to arrange that You will learn pretty quickly how much they value rice varieties that produce more rice and the impact producing more rice has on their lives and the lives of their families and communities To give you an idea of how rice genetics and rice breeding can help an assessment of IRI's work to develop new rice varieties showed that it was responsible for a rise in rice yields of 13% across nearly 25 years in three southeast Asian countries including the Philippines For farmers in the Philippines this means they now earn an extra 2300 pesos about 52 US dollars per hectare from using improved rice varieties to derive from the breeding work of IRI This kind of direct impact on the incomes of farmers goes a long way to lifting people out of poverty and more productive rice fields can lead to more rice in the market to sell which in turn can help rice prices to stay stable and affordable for rice consumers Therefore helping rice consumers out of poverty as well But what does all this have to do with GM rice? Well GM is one of the ways that we can breed new types of rice At IRI we are using GM to help us understand rice genes and to see if we can develop a new and vastly more productive type of rice known as C4 rice such as golden rice GM is also one of the topics we often get asked about even though it is a very small part of our overall research To set the scene it is important to start by stating that there are currently no commercially available GM rice varieties grown anywhere in the world yet However many organizations including IRI are researching GM rice because we believe GM rice has the potential to offer unique benefits that we can't achieve through other breeding methods But GM crops and GM food are not new Across the planet other GM crops have been grown since the 1990s and are currently planted by millions of farmers in around 30 countries on more than 170 million hectares Here in the Philippines GM corn is already grown by farmers and the number of other GM foods such as soybean and canola are approved for consumption and eaten here So while GM rice would be new it wouldn't be the first GM crop or food for the world, for Asia or even for the Philippines Nevertheless, we know people are curious about GM rice and have questions and concerns about it So we're looking forward to talking to you about our GM rice research today Thank you Thank you Sophie And we also in the interest of transparency and reaching as many interested members of the public as possible are webcasting this session through live.ere.org live.irri.org So for those of you who are blogging in the room would really appreciate the send out to your readers Also, there's live tweeting going on at hashtag Rice Genetics 7 Rice Genetics 7 one word Without further ado let's continue with Dr. Heilion who is the principal scientist and program leader of the genetic diversity and gene discovery group at IRI He will be talking about the value of rice genes Thank you Since we're talking about gene a lot in the next number of sessions So I'd like you to just get us on the same page Exactly 1955 that's when they discovered that DNA sequence actually DNA is a molecule is a chemical entity actually a cold gene that gives us our inheritance and characteristics So gene basically is a piece of DNA sequence on our chromosome like human, you and me have 23 pairs and in rice there are 12 pairs So just to visualize it a gene is sitting on the chromosome Now over the years of evolution gene accumulates differences and that's what constitutes genetic variation So the breeding program in IRI for years is relying on this enormous amount of genetic variation So rice as a crop is unusual in the sense that it's a very deep huge amount of variation and those of you may have attended this morning we talk about genetic variation for whole morning Rice is very well endowed and IRI particularly well endowed in the sense that FAO entrusted us to keep a gene band which holds about 117,000 accession So that is almost a goal mark for us to to find out genetic variation and try to understand and so for all the most of IRI activity I would say 95% of genetic work is surrounding these natural variation I came to talk about it GMO work is a relatively small proportion of what we do So I just want to explain a little bit how we exploring the gene band So the gene band as I said is 100,000 accession and yet we estimated plant breeding over the years or many years only use about 5% of the genetic variation and maybe we look at about 25% of the accession and so we really thinking only the tip of the iceberg in terms of using diversity So as I said most of the activity is surrounding about understanding the diversity and the meaning of it and try to use it and sometimes over the years we have a lot of assessors like stress tolerance like disease and insect resistance are coming from the natural variation and our more recent success including flood tolerance salinity salt tolerance and as well as drug tolerance So these are success that we can derive from the genetic variation and yet at times we want to look for something but it's not there so we have to look for additional means to enhance our breeding code and then today's topic about the golden rice finding pro vitamin A rice is one of that example that is we try our best in the past past few years to look for yellow rice because we think that vitamin A rice would be yellow so in such cases we have to look for other means that's the basis why we talk about the golden rice and there are other cases nutritional trade like iron maybe we don't have enough iron in the rice grain so we also explore other genetic engineering approaches so that lead to my point that in order to understand rice diversity and make good use of it so we are launching an ambitious program last started a few years ago is to using technology to sequence all the sessions or majority of sessions to reveal I would say the mystery or the coding the unknown about these rice sessions so by knowing just imagine knowing the fingerprint detail fingerprint DNA fingerprint of these sessions will allow us to make good use of it so I think it is timely for me to pass the microphone to Tom who will talk about how is his organization helping theory in working on this sequencing project Thank you Dr. Leon I'm Tom Nevesero I'm probably the non-geneticist here I learned most of my genetics from YouTube but as an engineer I understand semicon and the solution to sequencing 117,000 varieties in a good time or in a good economic way is to do it cheaply and fast as you know 10 years ago it took over what several years and 3 billion dollars to sequence the human genome I'd like to make an announcement today that GINA which stands for Genomic Insulin of Asia which we seated as a not-for-profit entity sequence the first Filipino reference for black rice so this will be announced on Friday and you're all welcome to join the launching of GINA at Erie this Friday for lunch so there we will hand off or hand over the first initial reference of the first Filipino rice reference black rice GINA as I said is not-for-profit quick food technology that can basically hopefully sequence one day the key varieties in that gene bank of Dr. Pichichang and those varieties can then be used by our researchers this machine uses a chip can you imagine we can do 20 rice genomes in one chip under 4 to 6 hours so there is possibility that we one day can at least do more than 5% of those 117,000 varieties and hopefully do all so that the researchers can find out specific phenotypes or specific characteristics that they can use for breeding rice for the future GINA does not stand for the Genetic Information Non-Discriminatory Act this is one thing we need in this country because genetics is growing very fast GINA stands for the Institute that will help Erie and we don't build institutions or facilities so we entered into a collaboration other not-for-profit program with Erie so we can help Erie's research with rice and we felt that this is important to us especially to another Sarah family because we've lived in Los Pines for the last 50 years and Erie was one of our first clients the key thing though is we are not just doing it for rice we are also going to start the Filipino reference for the Filipino human for medical purposes so one day we will complete the reference for the Filipinos and also improve the sequencing for our medical traits medical issues, cancer problems and so forth so GINA is here not just for ag vial but also for medical reasons thank you thank you Tom do we have any directly relevant questions to what Dr. Hay or Mr. Navasaro talks about we will have an opportunity to have a discussion at toward the end of the session okay so let's continue thank you and having discussed the richness of rice genetic diversity and the importance of using technology for genetic sequencing we now move to trying to answer the question why GM rice and to help us explore that we have Dr. Akim Doberman who is deputy director general for research at IRI I'll try to do this in relatively simple terms which is easy for me because I'm not a geneticist anyway so I can't really speak in very complicated terms that nobody understands the expectation is that with all the evolutionary progress that you've just heard about in terms of gene sequencing and the discovery of the functions of many of the genes that exist and many of the traditional as well as cultivated varieties of rice the expectation is that with all of that we are going to make tremendous progress in conventional breeding because if we have those genes or if we understand their function we can more specifically breed new rice varieties by choosing the right ones to cross with each other using molecular markers to look for the presence of the genes we want and basically achieve what I mentioned in my plenary talk this morning to use better rice varieties in half the time that in the past so that is the new big opportunity and it's conventional breeding enhanced with molecular biotechnology to it and so it is also a normal form of genetic modification but there is this other form of genetic modification that often is mentioned under the term of GM or GMO or transgenic that basically requires the transfer of one or more genes from another organism which could be another plant or microorganism or it could be even an animal of some kind into rice so that's the distinguishing factor coming from something else other than rice and the technology for that is such that it allows us to do this fairly precisely so we are able to really say if we wanted to change rice in a way that naturally achieved because it doesn't have enough variation in the available genetic gene pool of rice if we wanted to change it by engineering a certain biochemical pathway differently we need this or this gene from another organism to achieve that change so it's basically technology if you wish that achieves one or more genes that otherwise could be difficult to achieve or in some cases might evolutionary take millions of years to achieve if you wish so that's the background and I think it's very important to distinguish this has nothing to do with molecular breeding or hybrids so it's basically distinguishing technology in which we precisely try to change rice and so we always have to therefore make a strategic decision when does this make sense and when does it not make sense or default position for this is always it is much easier not to do it that way if we can so the majority of rice breeding is that way and why is that because if we can achieve the plant in a conventional sense we can release this variety quickly whereas if we go the transgenic route or the GMO route we have to follow a very long process into its many stages of evaluation and deregulation we have to go through biosafety approval we have to go through we have to do any kind of environmental or nutritional health impact studies and we have to do consumer acceptance studies so you can see the list of these things is long and therefore the development cost and time to do this would also be very long and expensive that is the fundamental reason or one of the fundamental reasons why until now no GM rise has been released and it has taken a long time and particularly public sector institutions often simply do not have the resources to do this the GM crops that have been commercialized worldwide have primarily been developed by large private companies including the BT the brand up ready corn that is now dominating the corn market in the Philippines so once under five years of gender and delights and they have a commercial interest to do this because they patented gene and put it into the background of a hybrid therefore you have a product to sell each year to your farmers when we do GM rise we have a very different philosophy number one is we only do it for traits that have potentially large humanitarian impact so when we talk about golden rice it is because there are millions of people particularly children and women who are vitamin A deficient in all attempts to get rid of this vitamin A deficiency have failed so far