Nuclear Arms Agreements and Human Rights

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Dean Reuter:  Welcome to Teleforum, a podcast of The Federalist Society's Practice Groups. I’m Dean Reuter, Vice President, General Counsel, and Director of Practice Groups at The Federalist Society. For exclusive access to live recordings of Practice Group Teleforum calls, become a Federalist Society member today at fedsoc.org.

 

 

Micah Wallen:  Welcome to The Federalist Society's Teleforum Conference call. This afternoon's topic is titled, "Nuclear Arms Agreement and Human Rights." My name is Micah Wallen, and I'm the Assistant Director of Practice Groups at The Federalist Society.

 

      As always, please note that all expressions of opinion are those of the experts on today's call.

 

      And today, we are fortunate to have with us our Moderator, Sean Nelson, who is Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom at ADF International. Sean will be introducing the rest of our panel today.

 

And after our panel gives their opening remarks, we will then open up the floor for an audience Q&A. Thank you for sharing with us today. Sean, the floor is yours.

 

Sean Nelson:  Hello, everyone, and thank you, Micah. And thank you all so much for joining us at this exciting and very relevant teleforum today. I want to thank the organizers in The Federalist Society for hosting it and for inviting me to moderate. And I especially want to thank our expert panelists who are all just incredible experts in today's topic.

 

      As Micah mentioned, my name is Sean Nelson. I'm Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom with ADF International. ADF International, the international sister organization of Alliance Defending Freedom, and we work to protect fundamental freedoms including religious freedom for all people throughout the world.

 

      My own work is focused on countries where religious groups and especially religious minorities face the most severe persecution, areas in Africa, the Middle East, and throughout Asia.

     

      Today's topic is on Nuclear Arms [Agreements] and Human Rights and is certainly one that has been debated fiercely in the past few years. Essentially, we will be examining to what extent human rights concerns should be included in nuclear non-proliferation and arms agreements and negotiations with countries [inaudible 02:10] human rights [inaudible 02:12] in thinking of the topic more broadly.

 

      The one hand, the danger that nuclear weapons pose when wielded by dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, hardly needs to be stated. It is hard to imagine a weightier concern than preventing such regimes from obtaining nuclear weapons or when they've already acquired them, ensuring that they are not used.

 

      But on the other hand, when fanatical regimes create political prison camps and concentration camps, as in North Korea, or jails, tortures, and murders, political dissidence and religious minorities while pursuing clandestine operations to interfere in the affairs of other countries and inspire terror, as in Iran. There's a deep concern that the weightiness of nuclear non-proliferation will cause democratic nations to look the other way on these grave violations of human rights and clear human suffering.

 

      Similarly, there's a question of whether these rogue regimes can ever be trusted, even if an agreement were to be reached. The differing approaches towards Iran between the Obama and Trump administrations is only one of the most recent examples of these questions playing out in real life.

 

      This is only a very broad outline of the basic terms of the discussion. I'm very much looking forward to hearing from our panelists, who I know will bring far greater detail and nuance to these difficult but essential questions.

 

      First, we have Professor David A. Koplow of Georgetown University Law Center, who is an expert on national security law and policy and who has served in a number of senior U.S. government arms control positions.

 

      Second, we have Roya Hakakian, who grew up in post-revolutionary Iran and is an acclaimed author and the Founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center.

 

      And finally, we'll have Ben Rogers, who serves as the East Asia Team Leader at Christian Solidarity Worldwide and is the Founder of The International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea.

 

      As earlier mentioned, the structure for today's forum is as follows. Our panelists will have roughly six minutes or so each to give opening remarks. And then I'll propose one or two questions in response, and the panelists may also pose questions and answers for each other. The remaining time afterwards will be preserved for questions from the Teleforum audience and then for closing remarks.

 

      So Professor Koplow, if you could please start us off.

 

Prof. David A. Koplow:  Well, thank you. It's a great pleasure to be with you today, and I begin by expressing my appreciation for the organizers and sponsors for assembling this program and giving me the opportunity to participate in it. I look forward to an interesting discussion of these very important and current issues.

 

      I thought that, perhaps, I could be of most help at the outset here by framing the issue, by offering a structure for how to think creatively and rigorously about treaties or other national agreements dealing with human rights and arms control issues.

 

      And to me, the context for setting this up is the concept of linkage, asking what sorts of issues are linked to each other in a negotiation. So they could be combined into a single instrument, or not, and traded off against each other, or not. Linkage is a perennial issue in all negotiations, whether it's between adversary countries, between labor and management, between Congress and the White House, or in the most extreme circumstances, between parents and their children.

 

      The question is what issues are independent? Which issues are linked? When can you make a deal that productively combines topics A, B, and C? And when is it better to have separate, sequential agreements, first on A and then on B and then maybe on C?

 

      And to reveal my own bottom-line, for my part, I am agnostic about this. It seems to me there is no generic one size fits all, no overall answer in principal. Rather, it's a very fact specific, case by case analysis on what's attainable in any particular context. With a particular constellation, negotiating participants and a specific range of issues, is a big multipurpose arrangement attainable? Or is it more productive to shoot for smaller steps, even baby steps and hope for a series of steps over time?

 

      One other important note at the outset, in the context of arms control and human rights treaties, we're talking about negotiations with adversaries. These are generally countries we're worried about. We anticipate the possibility of bad action, even hostilities. We don't see eye to eye. We don't really need arms control and human rights treaties with our friends.

 

United States doesn't care how many weapons Canada possesses. We care about Iran. United States is not so apprehensive about England's human rights records. We focus on North Korea. And that means that it's numb nut for us to simply express our preferences and make our demands. If you want to make a deal with an adverse party, it's a negotiation, a give and take.

 

If we want more on Issue A, we should expect to have to give more on Issue B. And it might be that Issue C is simply off the table for the other side. They won't negotiate on it, or at least not offer a bargain on any terms we could accept.

 

Again, international politics is the art of the possible. So it's not just a question of what we want or what we might be interested in accomplishing, we need to negotiate a deal. The other side gets a boat too. And they make us feel more noble to pound the table and insist on pure and comprehensive objectives. But if we want to make an agreement, we need to compromise.

 

So I'd like to illustrate what I mean by the concept of linkage. Let me give some concrete examples. Probably the best illustration of a broad, multilateral treaty, joined by many states and addressing a wide array of issues, is the Charter of the United Nations.

 

This one document combines an incredibly wide array of successfully linked topics, ranging from peace and security to human rights, economic development, trusteeship for non-self-governing territories to the establishment of the International Court of Justice. This one Treaty has been joined by virtually all the countries in the world and establishes a modern foundation for connecting all those diverse areas of law.

 

Another example of breadth of scope of linking multiple issues together is the traditional FCN Treaty. That's a treaty dealing with friendship, commerce, and navigation. The FCN Treaty used to be the first kind of treaty that countries would negotiate with each other when they first open normal diplomatic relations.

 

The United States has negotiated dozens of FCN treaties with countries around the world. They differ somewhat from country to country as the negotiations required, but usually, they deal with topics such as a pledge of peace, allowing ships from one country to dock in another, allowing nationals from one country to enter into the other and conduct business there. They link together that rather broad array of topics.

 

So there's some treaties that do successfully deal with a wide array of topics. The concept of linkage has brought those diverse issues into a single document. But sometimes, the practice comes out the other way, and here's a brief story from the early history of arms control in the post-World War II era.

 

Early in the Cold War, the government advocates had a very broad and ambitious agenda. They wanted to deal with nuclear weapons, of course, but also with chemical weapons and biological weapons and all manner of conventional forces based on land, sea, and air. And sometimes, they abbreviated that wide range of topics in the phrase general and complete disarmament.

 

And the concept of general and complete disarmament was so -- deemed as wide-spread currency that it even had its own abbreviation, and people talked about GCD as a link issue. And some components insisted that the different strands of GCD were inextricably linked. So that entire package of issues needed to be addressed as one.

 

They proposed that no separate agreements could be reached on any part of it, nuclear, chemical, or biological or anything else, until all the aspects could be dealt with simultaneously. At least as a threshold matter, agreement on the sequence on what topics would be -- what treaties on separate topics would be concluded at different times.

 

Other advocates suggested that if it proves too difficult to develop a simultaneous global solution to everything at once, it'd be advisable to take partial, incremental steps as they became available. And some advocated that we should be willing to take modest, partial steps when that became politically possible, pursuing a step-by-step approach to the overall goal of GCD.

 

Again, to me, there's no right answer to this dilemma, just a question what's practically possible. During the 1950s, rigid insistence upon an all or nothing approach to GCD turned out to be fruitless. Nothing resulted.

 

When the politics changed a bit and became acceptable for the United States and the former Soviet Union to pursue partial steps, some meaningful progress was possible: The Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, the SALT I Treaty in 1972. None of them was a complete measure. Each was only a partial step. Each did only a part of the task that the world needed, but they were better than nothing.

 

And it's also worth recalling that at that time, as today in dealing with Iran and North Korea, the United States and the Soviet Union had a great many antagonisms with each other. We were concerned not only about the Soviet Nuclear Program but about their aggression in Eastern Europe, their missiles in Cuba, their Gulag Archipelago. Many of these, a serious problem. The overall strategy therefore had to be to try to deal with some areas of mutual interest, such as reducing the likelihood of global nuclear war, where we could work together despite the continuation of many other serious problems that, for better or worse, were just not yet ripe for addressing internationally.

 

In the field of human rights too, we see both kinds of treaties. Some are big picture instruments that link together many issues. And some are smaller picture agreements that deal in isolation with a single specialized topic.

 

The best illustrations of the broad approach would be the two 1967 covenants—one dealing with civil and political rights, one dealing with economic, social, and cultural rights—both combining big clusters of issues and have succeeded in accomplishing nearly universal acceptance.

 

On the other hand, we also see separate human rights treaties, one by one, prohibiting in more detail, particular outrages. The treaty on genocide is separate from the treaty on torture. The treaty on the rights of the child is distinct from the treaty on discrimination against women and from the treaty dealing with race discrimination and discrimination against disabled people. And most of those human rights treaties have established their own independent monitored bodies, each one of which deals with its special focus.

 

On today's discussion, human rights and arms control, those two topics have rarely been combined into a single instrument. Probably the best illustration of success in doing that is the Helsinki process, the Helsinki Accords, which embraced both kinds of concerns. They deal with human rights and with weapons in the same series of instruments. But mostly, these two strings of treaties usually remain separate.

 

In fact, from one perspective, most international agreements are relatively narrowly focused. It's the individual treaties that deal with discreet, single purpose items like extradition or a treaty on postal or telegraph agreements, or conservation of endangered species or cooperation in peaceful activities in outer space or anti-personal land mine.

 

And in general, the politics has driven negotiators in the direction of having each treaty concentrate on a single particular kind of issue. Sometimes they're combinations, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

 

Finally, let me turn just briefly to dealings today with Iran and North Korea. That's going to be our special focus. Again, the starting point is the U.S. has many serious issues with them, and they with us. The agenda of topics we need to address is broad, not just nuclear weapons and missile testing and proliferation but human rights and support for terrorism and counterfeiting U.S. currency and kidnapping foreign nationals, cybercrime, violation of intellectual property rights and much, much more.

 

One approach is to say that we just cannot or should not deal with people who do so many such terrible things. We should sanction them. We should pressure them. We should isolate them. We should support regime change.

 

Another approach is to say we should insist on a package deal that addresses all the key issues simultaneously, not privileging any single subcategory. Don't conclude a nuclear deal unless we can also reach a strong, enforceable accord on human rights and other grievances at the same time.

 

My own approach would be to proceed as far as fast as the traffic will tolerate, which may not be very fast. Do what deals you can do on the premise that each partial step has to be in the interest of both countries, hope that each step will lead to others. But each step has to be self-sufficient and mutually beneficial on its own, and don't expect an agreement on any one topic will automatically lead to other agreements on other topics.

 

Each agreement might lead to better relations, but you can't count on being able to cash in on anything. But don't categorically insist on a package of any particular size. Sometimes in negotiations, it's helpful to make the problem larger and more complex, putting more issues on the table simultaneously can enhance the scope of possible offsetting trade. If two countries are at logger heads on Issue X, maybe they can find a scope for mutually acceptable compromise by putting Y on the table as well so they can bargain across the stream, but sometimes not.

 

So that's more on my bottom line, or my introductory observation about today's topic. When it comes to human rights and arms control treaties, it all depends. I'll leave it there.

 

Sean Nelson:  Thank you, Professor Koplow, for just wonderfully laying out all the many different facets that go into all sorts of treaties and especially in both nuclear arms agreement and in human rights treaties. And I think that gives us a lot to think about, especially as we look at two particular countries, as you've mentioned, which would be Iran and North Korea. And so we'll be starting with Iran and with Roya. Roya, if you'd like to make your statement.

 

Roya Hakakian:  Yes. I think in principle, I agree with the notion that creating possibilities of negotiations and treaties is a preferred approach, that it is healthier for the global community and for the local community to be able to strike a diplomatic view as opposed to any other that could lead to war or conflict.

 

      What I'm going to argue today is why Iran has proven not to be a candidate for such a negotiation, which is to say that it doesn't mean that other nations or other countries cannot be negotiated with. It just means that in my view, Iran's 40-year record shows that no negotiations with Iran can be reliable or lead to an end, even an interim or short term goal that would be something that would be ideal or even less than ideal, but a better place than where we were prior to the negotiation.

 

      To begin with, I want to say that I am not in any shape or form—this is my disclaimer—advocating for war. I'm just going to say in my little statement why I believe that negotiations won't work. But this is not to say that I think the other option is therefore war and Iran should be attacked. That is not the purpose of this statement.

 

      One thing I want to bring to the focus today about Iran, its own relationship, the relationship between the government and the country and the nation and to examine whether or not this particular government has a constructive relationship with its own people. And I'm not talking about human rights even. I'm talking about economic ambition, educational ambition, scientific ambition. Or is it a non-constructive or even destructive relationship with the nation at large and with the country?

 

      China's example is probably the best in that -- just to bring to light what it is that I'm trying to say here. China is a great violator of human rights, but it does have scientific, global trade, and supremacy ambitions. China wants to live up to the current global standards at every level. China wants to lead in the area of medical breakthroughs. China wants to lead in entertainment. China wants to be the hub for education. China, whatever the measure is, China wants to be number one.

 

      However, Iran, at the moment, does not have any such ambition. Prior to the Revolution in 1979, there was a king who wanted to make Iran, as he put it in his own terms, a great civilization. His terminology was to return Iran to the grand historical civilization that it once was, to restore it to that historical greatness and took a great deal of steps to bring Iran as close to that dream as he could. And in the process of doing so, he cared a great deal about his standing or the world's perception of his nation. He cared a great deal what Iran's relationship was with Europe, with its neighbors, with, of course, the United States.

 

But at the same time, he was also ambitious in every possible way. And by the way, let us not forget that he was the person who came up and who initiated this process of building a nuclear Iran. So everything that this current regime has been pursuing since then is following in the footsteps of the Shah -- of the nuclear project that began with him.

 

The current regime's relationship with the country and the nation is a bizarre one, is one in which the clerics, the leadership of Iran looks upon the country and its resources as a way of filling its own private coffers in order to provide remittances for their own members of their own family and relatives, nearly all of whom have homes and residences and citizenships in the Western world.

 

In other words, these are -- the grandchildren of Ayatollah Khomeini no longer live in Iran. So much so that when the daughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, was asked why her daughter was living in Toronto, she had to come up with something as absurd as because she believes that when she prays to God in Toronto, God hears her better.

 

In other words, they are coming up with whatever way that they can to justify why they need to have secondary homes and residences and lives in countries other than Iran and why their children refuse to return to Iran anymore.

 

So what does this mean? This means that there is no long-term plan for building a nation, even an Islamic nation, even a nation that adheres to whatever ideological framework that was shipped for it back then by Ayatollah Khomeini, that it's the relationship of the leadership with the people is basically a repressive one and with its neighbors, is a relationship of control but through the process of destabilization.

 

So I think having really seen this particular predicament being played out in Iran over the last many years, especially since 1997 when the hope of reform was born with the rising of President Khatami, the first reformed president to power, and the two decade long failure after failure after failure of the reform movement to the point in which there is no distinction that one can possibly make between the hard liners and the reformists, that it seems like a silly game of good cop bad cop between two factions of the very same regime trying to hold up the very same foundations of power.

 

It seems that given the loss for the hope of reform and the complete absence of accountability or local ambitions by the regime for its own people, for its own future in the country, that negotiations will be unadvisable, that they cannot possibly lead to anything meaningful because they are not only unreliable partners but also partners that are completely corrupt and are completely corrupt.

 

Now, the other thing that I think is important with respect to Iran is whatever the regime isn't doing and whatever the regime is not, the civil society it is. There is a very robust and significant women's movement in Iran. Perhaps, despite the circumstances, the political circumstances, the women's movement in Iran is the leading women's movement in the region, I dare to say.

 

And despite all the pressures and the violence that the regime has exercised in treating demonstrators and various protests, there has been at least two major demonstrations or periods of protests in Iran that with serious planning and international support could have led to change in Iran.

 

Most recently, last November, Iran saw the greatest political protest it had seen since 1979. It resulted in the arrest of 7,000 prisoners and -- I mean 7,000 protestors and the killing of an upwards of 1,000 activists from the streets.

 

So I think if the situation on the ground in Iran was such that there was no hope of a movement or some sort of change brought through the civil society, one could say that supporting it or inventing it however was meaningless.  But there is a very important, very active, very robust civil society in Iran. There is in every possible shape or form an unreliable leadership that has no loyalty to the nation other than to itself and for its own selfish purposes.

 

And therefore, I think any agreement that would in any way prop up the leadership and undermine the civil society that exists in Iran will be to the disadvantage of both parties.

     

Sean Nelson:  Well, thank you, Roya, and for that great analysis of what the history of Iran when it comes to these issues and for the current political climate, especially with the contrast between the corruption in the regime and the glimmers of hope with the civil society there.

 

And I think there's a lot to think of, especially thinking of it in dialogue with Professor Koplow's statement about what kinds of -- that realm of the possible, what kinds of regimes is it possible to deal with? What are the political concerns when you're looking at a particular case that make an agreement more or less likely, that make possibilities for advancing human rights more or less likely, and the particular strategy to take?

 

      So finally, we'll be looking at another case which is North Korea, and Ben Rogers will be discussing that. So Ben, if you'd like to go.

 

Benedict Rogers:  Thank you very much. Well, can I start by saying that it's a very great pleasure and privilege to be joining you. I'm joining you from, as you can probably guess from my accent, from London. But it's great to be with you and a privilege to follow the two previous speakers. And thank you to the organizers for organizing this.

 

      I have been working on North Korea for a little over 10 years, and I should say my focus is very much the human rights situation. I have no expertise at all in the nuclear question other than viewing it as I look at the country as a whole.

 

      But I do think that there are -- when we look at North Korea, there are essentially four strands that really are interrelated and should go together in some form. And those are the terrible human rights crisis, obviously, the security question and the nuclear question, thirdly, the humanitarian situation, and fourthly, what I call breaking the information blockade, the need to try to actually open up North Korea rather than keep it closed.

 

      And so I have been an advocate of what I call critical engagement. I think that our objective overall should not be to keep North Korea isolated. It should be to try to find ways to pry it open in a way that removes, ideally, or mitigates it at least, the security risk and the nuclear threat but also a way that addresses the human rights crisis and the humanitarian situation without appeasing or in any way endorsing the regime.

 

      But we live in an era right now because of COVID-19, where the phrases self-isolation and social distancing are phrases that are used. And those are phrases that I think the North Korean regime itself has been following. It has self-isolated and socially distanced itself by its actions and by its nature from the world. And our objective should be to change that.

 

      Just by way of background, I visited North Korea only once, but in 2010, with two British parliamentarians who lead the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, which is roughly the equivalent of a congressional caucus, Lord Alton of Liverpool and Baroness Cox. And they are two of the foremost champions of human rights generally, and including on North Korea, in our Parliament.

 

      And yet, they, for a period of time, from between about 2003 and 2010, found themselves having channels of communication with the North Korean regime and actually being invited on three occasions. And I accompanied them on one occasion to North Korea. And they found for that period, a window of opportunity where there were people at fairly senior levels in the North Korean regime that were willing to at least have a conversation, and they clearly wanted to have some kind of helping hand, if you'd like, in the outside world because they recognized the hole that they were in.

 

That window of opportunity for some kind of critical engagement, at least for Lord Alton and Baroness Cox and myself, closed really after Kim Jong Un came into power. But it was there, and it was possible to at least have a conversation about the human rights questions. I'm not pretending that that conversation led anywhere in concrete terms, but it was worth pursuing.

 

But one of the principles that Lord Orson advocated, and that I strongly support and Professor Koplow alluded to this in his remarks, was a Helsinki-style approach. And I believe in the case of North Korea, that we should pursue a Helsinki-model where the human rights questions are put on the table alongside the security questions.

 

I don't have strong views on whether it should all be in one treaty or whether there should be different treaties and different stages. I'm not so concerned about the mechanics of it, but what I'm definitely concerned about is the overall architecture should include the human rights questions alongside the security questions. And they should not be sacrificed in pursuit of security.

 

Lord Alton, way back in 2003 in the House of Lords in one of his first speeches in a debate on North Korea, put the two together by saying these words. "The threat to international security posed by North Korea may best be considered by way of the pernicious actions against its own citizens. North Korea's Stalinist dictatorship has treated its own people with unbelievable brutality and viciousness. The people are starving—this is 2003—the people are starving. The hospitals are without medicine, and a whole generation has grown up stunted because of malnutrition."

 

So I think the nature of the regime is exhibited in the way it treats its own people and handles human rights as much as it is in the nuclear question. And therefore, talking of linkages, the two are surely linked.

 

Just expanding on the human rights question even further, I was deeply involved, and my organization was one of the first organizations to call for a United Nations Commission of Inquiry to investigate the human rights situation. And when we first got the calling for it, many people said to us you're wasting your time, you're banging your heads against a brick wall. The only interest for the international community in regards to North Korea is the nuclear question and no one will support this.

 

Well, we took the view that if enough of us banged our heads against a brick wall for long enough, we might get a headache in the process, but we may just manage to dislodge a few bricks. And so we kept advocating it. We joined with other organizations and formed the International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea, with a specific objective of calling for a UN Commission of Inquiry.

 

And in the end, we succeeded, and that Commission of Inquiry was setup. And its conclusions are damning. They describe widespread and systematic crimes against humanity. They talk of unspeakable atrocities, and the Commission concludes that the gravity scale and nature of the human rights situation in North Korea reveals a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.

 

And so I would argue that given the strength of those conclusions from the most in depth and the most authoritative and comprehensive investigation into the human rights situation means that it cannot be an issue that is simply sacrificed or to put to one side for the sake of pursuing a nuclear deal, especially when a nuclear deal itself is so elusive.

 

And so I think the accountability question for accountability for crimes against humanity should be on the table, and sanctions, I believe, should be linked to the human rights situation and not just to the security situation.

 

So I was in 2018 when -- first of all, the South Korean president, President Moon, began his engagement with North Korea, and we saw those extraordinary scenes of him and Kim Jong Un meeting, including meeting on the border of North and South. And then of course President Trump's efforts to engage with Kim Jung Un at the two summits in Singapore and in Vietnam.

 

I was not against the principle of attempting to talk because I had long advocated if there were ways to talk to North Korea, that's better than not talking. But what I was very concerned about and disappointed about both with President Moon and with President Trump's approach was that it appeared, at least certainly in terms of what was said in public and from what I could gather of what was said in private, that the human rights questions really were at best completely sidelined and possibly not mentioned at all. Certainly, in President Moon's case, he was very eager to stifle discussion of the human rights questions, and I think that's a profound mistake.

 

I look back to the example of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and how they confronted both the nuclear security threat and the human rights situation in the Soviet Union together. And I think that should be the model for us.

 

I'll close just by quoting some words from some of these, who may or may not be familiar to you from the United States, called David Hawk, who published the groundbreaking report on North Korea's prison camp system called the Hidden Gulag. And he's been second to none in terms of his tireless outspoken criticism of the North Korean regime's atrocious human rights record.

 

But what's perhaps less known but I think important is that he has advocated the kind of approach that I just outlined as well. Because I think too often the issue has been polarized in the human rights field. It's been polarized between those who say punish and isolate only and those who say engage. And actually, I and David Hawk are people who, and Lord Alton, are people who say we need to do both where we can.

 

But there's also this polarization between the human rights and security questions which shouldn't be. And David Hawk published a paper in 2010 titled, "Pursuing Peace While Advancing Rights: The Untried Approach to North Korea," which he describes as a fundamentally new and untried approach.

 

And he says these words, "For the last 20 years, the paradigm that has guided approaches to North Korea is that the pursuit of peace, either in the form of diplomatic discussions centering on North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs or in the form of extended social and economic and political engagement, aims at fostering improved relationships between North Korea and other nation states that intersect in Northeast Asia, that that approach has required that human rights concepts be kept off the table and that North Korea's potential partners in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation affect a deaf, dumb, blind, and mute posture towards the systematic severe and widespread human rights violations in North Korea.

 

Over the last two decades, there have been recurring cycles of provocation, confrontation, and crisis, alternating with negotiations and engagement. Throughout, these two contrasting approaches to North Korea, negotiations, reconciliation, and engagement in the pursuit of peace in ways that rebuff human rights considerations or alternatively the raising of human rights concerns about North Korea in the absence of an attempt to reconcile and engage North Korea, have both failed.

 

There is an alternative that would pursue peace, engagement, and reconciliation in association with the promotion and protection of human rights, a fundamentally new and untried approach."

 

So I don’t have enough expertise to comment on exactly the sequencing and the mechanisms of doing this, but what I would very strongly argue is that in the overall strategy and approach to North Korea, you cannot separate human rights from the security questions. And they must be on the table together in the same way that they were, or a similar way at least, that they were in the Helsinki process. Thank you very much.

 

Sean Nelson:  Thank you, Ben. And your work on human rights in North Korea and elsewhere is always a fantastic reading and a real inspiration for me personally. And so I really appreciate you joining this panel. And on the subject of nuclear agreements and human rights, this is -- we have another model here, right, that's been brought up, which is this question of trying to figure a way to bundle everything together in a practical way. I think you called it conscious engagement or something to that effect.

 

      And so we have a lot of models here, and I want to be aware of the time and make sure we have at least a couple minutes for audience questions. I want to ask, at the beginning, a question regarding specific models for engagement and how we understand agreements and negotiations in relation to a whole approach to a particular country and a whole approach to the different kinds of interests that the U.S. might have in that country or the world might have in that country.

 

      And so Professor Koplow mentioned that issue of linkage and whether particular subjects should come together in the same kind of agreement, whether they should be treated separately, or whether perhaps there's different approaches. And, Ben, you were really emphasizing that at the end that this -- you were bringing up a particular model, the Helsinki model, of trying to bring the linkages between the different nuclear agreements, human rights, openness in terms of information sharing, the humanitarian crisis there.

 

      And similarly, Roya, the way that you were talking about just because you don't believe that the Iranian regime right now is really a regime that you can negotiate with, that does not mean that the only option then is war.

 

So I'd like to just ask a little bit more about how do you view different systems and agreements working together, one of the big issues that was brought up is the issue of sanctions, right, and I know that's been really one of the controversies around some of the nuclear agreements is that when sanctions are lifted, does that seem to provide additional funding for regimes that have massive human rights violations and often use funding for those reasons?

 

      And so those sorts of trade-offs, right, where there might be a small step forward, but does that include a small step backward as well? How do you deal with that as part of the focus on the agreement, as part of a general system of different kinds of engagement, right, of international pressure, things like that?

 

So that's for everybody. I know it's a big question, but I think it was broached and then we can go to audience questions.

 

Roya Hakakian:  Can I respond to that?

 

Sean Nelson:  Sure, please.

 

Roya Hakakian:  Okay. So I think to begin with, it's for all the rest as well, the non-Iranians, non-North Koreans, to begin to exercise a new kind of imagination to come up with a whole host of other ways of weakening, engaging, undermining these tyrannical orders and strengthening the internal civil societies.

 

      There are, when it comes to Iran, there are three stellar, however, unknown examples of such approaches that the international community has taken with Iran that have proven to be incredibly effective, while at the same time helping the cause of human rights in Iran.

 

      I will go one that I know best, which is one I wrote a whole book about. The book is called, "Assassins of the Turquoise Palace," and it focuses on Iran's extrajudicial assassinations of dissidents around the world, including the United States, Rome, Paris, and the case I wrote about took place in Berlin, Germany.

 

      Now, for those who are not familiar with Iran's extrajudicial operations, there has been a list of 500 opposition leaders, writers, intellectuals, even artists that way at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution had been drawn up by Ayatollah Khomeini and a close circle of his companions. And the Iranian regime was systematically eliminating the names that were on that list, no matter where those individuals were.

 

      Until they came to Berlin, Germany to assassinate four Kurdish leaders who had come to Germany for a conference. And so the story that I tell is that while the regime manages or the henchmen manage to assassinate those four Kurdish Iranian leaders in Berlin in 1992, the investigation, the trial, and the verdict that ensues completely forced Iran in 1997 to cease these operations against the people on that list.

 

Meaning that when the judgment from the case same forth on April 10, 1997, it implicated the highest leadership of Iran and named, by the way, the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, as having been the culprits of the assassinations. And as a result of this judgment, the entire EU community cut ties with Iran.

 

      So what this brought about was a great deal of pressure on Iran and a place where they no longer could politically, even with a nation on the inside, move anywhere unless they came up with some other approach to their own -- toward international community, which, by the way, it coincided with the rise of Khatami rise to power.

 

      So in April 1997, the judgment from the court came forth. And in June 1997, President Khatami the First, reformist president in Iran, with the message of a dialogue of conversation, came to power. So that is one prime example. And thereafter, Iran never pursued, at least not in that overt way that it was doing, never pursued or assassinated members of competition or whatever name was on that list.

 

      A second example --

 

Sean Nelson:  Roya, let me real quick -- just to make sure in terms of time and everything, we only have a few minutes left. For Ben, do you see any opportunities right now -- I'll just ask two quick questions, one for Ben and one for Professor Koplow. Do you see any opportunities like that right now, like what Roya just meant to use, a diversity of approaches to improve the human rights situation while also potentially trying to bring North Korea a little bit back into the world community, as difficult as that might be?

 

      And then for Professor Koplow, I hope you could speak a little bit to Iran and just what do you see as the possible way of moving forward and potentially balancing the different interests in going forward with Iran in terms of nuclear weapons, in terms of human rights? So those questions and then we may have time for one question. I'm not sure if we will. And I apologize if we run out of time.

 

Benedict Rogers:  Yeah. Sean, just a couple of quick points on that question. Yes, I certainly think that there are more opportunities, although, clearly, the engagements that we thought was opening up both in South Korea and with the United States in 2018 appeared not to have gone anywhere.

 

      But I think there are other areas I could talk about, but there are two things I'd highlight. One is I think the value of getting information into North Korea through the smuggling of DVD sticks and CDs and other means of getting material, sometimes in the form of South Korean dramas, other regular broadcasts, into North Korea.

 

That has certainly has an impact, and we did a report a couple of years ago highlighting that the one thing that has changed in North Korea is not the regime, and it hasn't changed because of the regime but it is the fact that people in North Korea have more awareness about the outside world and more awareness of criticisms of the regime that we might imagine.

 

      The second opportunity I think is to really engage, both in terms of strengthening their capacity for the future when the time comes when we can go back to North Korea but also as a source of information, really increase our engagement with North Korean exiles, the escapees, even in South Korea or indeed, in our own countries.

 

      Can I just in a few seconds add just one other comment on the issue of sanctions. And that's this, that I think there's one country that is an example of how not to handle the lifting of sanctions, and it wasn't in relation to a nuclear issue but the way the West, Britain, Europe, the United States, lifted the sanctions on Burma when we thought Burma was opening up, we did it all in one go.

 

We took everything off the table, and we, therefore, gave away all our leverage, and Burma now is really grinding to a halt in terms of human rights and democratization. Worse than that, it's gone backwards in some regards. And so I would argue that if we do lift sanctions in return for some progress, say, on the nuclear issue, we shouldn't lift them all in one go. Yes, we should recognize progress if it happens, but we should keep some sanctions on the table to pursue further progress.

 

Sean Nelson:  Thank you, Ben. And Professor Koplow, my earlier question.

 

Prof. David A. Koplow:  Sure. And I got to say, I'm struggling here to try to find some ways in which I might disagree with the other panelists. I so deeply, fundamentally agree with their horror and the indignation and the frustration in dealing with these outrageous regimes. But because clash is always more interesting than the tale, let me struggle to find some place where I could at least offer slightly different perspectives.

 

      And one of those have to do with exactly the point that your question goes to. Roya started by saying that today, we just can't negotiate with Iran. They're not a reliable negotiating partner. They engage in such outrageous behavior. They're so corrupt. They're so malevolent that no deal can stick.

 

      And I guess what I'd say that's true, but it was also true of the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War that they were even more fundamentally hostile to the United States and to all of western capitalism. They were irrational. You remember the famous incident with Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nation taking off his shoe and pounding the podium. We worried that they were just not capable of rational behavior. They engaged in assassination. They engaged in -- they had the original Gulag Archipelago.

 

When Ben was talking about how the North Korean regime engaged in Stalinist behavior, remember it was Stalin that we were dealing with with Soviet Union. And nonetheless, we found some limited modest incremental ways where we could work out over a period of time some meaningful agreements, both on human rights and on arms control. And it's not easy, and it's not automatic, and you got to insist on rigid verification of compliance and rigid enforcement of the obligation, but it's worth trying.

 

And that's my bottom line is that you got to look around for where there might be some limited scope for some limited kinds of engagement. I don't see it as arms control setting aside or relegating to a lower position human rights. For me, it's just a question of where is there some traction? Where can you get some limited starting points of agreements? And if the first agreements can come in human rights, great. If the first agreements come in arms control and non-proliferation or economic sanctions or anything else, I'd go for whatever areas you can reach agreement in to begin with.

 

Sean Nelson:  Very good. And thank you, Professor Koplow. And I think that's a very helpful thing for us to think about what has worked in the past and how can we use that now to drive them forward.

 

      Micah, I know we're at the top of the hour. I don't know if we have any time for one question or if we need to close.

 

Micah Wallen:  We can see if we have one question in the lineup from the audience before we close out. We have somebody joining in the queue, so we'll go ahead and try and fit that question in.

 

Eugene Kermon (sp):  Hi there, guys. Thank you for the great presentation. Eugene Carmine here. My question is what incentives do countries have in general to sign nuclear disarmament agreements, especially after a peaceful country like Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and we know what happened. It lost its territory. So why would tyrannical regimes voluntarily or otherwise give up their nuclear weapons?

 

Prof. David A. Koplow:  Well, so I'll start. The premise for the question is exactly right. Each country is going to be balancing its own perception of the advantages and disadvantages of any instrument, whether it deals with economic trade or human rights or arms control or anything else. And so far, what we've seen is that there are nine countries around the world that have no agreed to give up their nuclear weapons. And that's not, perhaps, surprising that the United States and Russia and China and the others calculate that it is in their interest to retain nuclear weapons.

 

      What is surprising to me is that there's 170 other countries around the world that have agreed to give up nuclear weapons and to do so in perpetuity, meaning that for their calculations, they believe that possessing nuclear weapons is not advantageous for their security, that it makes them more of a target than it gives them strength, that it reduces their security rather than enhancing their security.

 

      So the effort I think is to try to develop instruments, and maybe they have to be partial and limited and incremental at the start, to help other countries realize that they can achieve their legitimate security objectives without possessing nuclear weapons.

 

Micah Wallen:  All right. We have one question in the queue, so that'll be our last question of the day, and then we'll close out.

 

Jay Patel:  Hi. Good afternoon. This is Jay Patel, and this is a great session. So thanks Ben and the Society and the group of libertarians and others here. The question I would have for the panel of experts is a simple one, is what's the one thing that -- one area of common ground in terms of a common ground in understanding that might be able to -- that we can perhaps make progress if you or this panel were advising, say, the president, whoever gets elected, obviously. President Trump is in the running, obviously, but just out of curiosity, what's the one area you think is reasonable for us to try to make progress towards the next four years? Just out of curiosity, picking your brain here.

 

Roya Hakakian:  Can I just make a small point, which I think may contribute to this question too?

 

Sean Nelson:  Absolutely.

 

Roya Hakakian:  Okay. So I wasn't trying to say that Iran is bad or corrupt and therefore, it should not be a negotiating partner. The best, I guess, if I were to use a metaphor it would be the conversation I have with my kids whenever we see a panhandler on the street. Should we give them money if we have the sense that they're going to buy drugs with this money or not.

 

      I believe that Iran's detachment with its own nation and the absence of any sort of national plan makes Iran a nation or a regime that is going to be not only not respecting any contract but also using any opening that that contract make or buy to Iran to further abuse, misuse that opportunity in order to advance its attack on civil society, human rights, and its neighboring countries.

 

      So I am not trying to say that Iran is bad, don't negotiate. I know that there have been other bad nations. I think that what disqualifies Iran is its own relationship or the regime, I should say, its own relationship with its own country, with the country and with its own nation, that they have turned the country primarily into some sort of a business or storefront in order to fill their own coffers.

 

      So I think China is a different story, even Cuba was a different story. I think Iran is a wholly other model that needs pressure after pressure to any sort of possibility that presents itself, including, for instance, the Ukrainian Airbus that was shot down, makes -- and there has been no accountability for the 187 people who died last November in that shooting, in that attack.

 

Therefore, the international community has the opportunity to say that the Iranian air region zone is unsafe. And as long as we cannot guarantee safe passage and there is no accountability, we will not allow air travel. These are much better than negotiations and treaties. Every which way that we can press Iran and make Iran accountable to the international community that it needs to be in a relationship with.

 

Sean Nelson:  This is Sean, and I'm hoping we can -- I think that was an excellent question to lead into some concluding statements. And so if each panelist could take just a minute or so, make a summary remark, including thinking about what are the possibilities, what are the areas of common ground and common concerns in looking forward over the next four years, especially with regards to Iran and North Korea?

 

      Professor Koplow, do you want to start?

 

Prof. David A. Koplow:  Sure. And I can take, as the jumping off point, that last question about the agenda for future negotiations. For me, there are three predominant issues that the next president and the leaders of all countries around the world will have to deal with.

 

      One is pandemic disease, brought to our attention most vividly by the current Corona virus, but there are so many other possibilities where the world has a shared interest. Second would be global climate change. And third would be nuclear weapons and that in each of those areas, it seems to me that all countries, all people share a common interest in avoiding those existential crises that would threaten not just individual regimes but threaten the entire species.

 

      That doesn’t mean it's easy because once you start getting down into the weeds, individual countries will have different approaches to nuclear weapons control, to climate change, to disease control, but that's at least a starting point. Those are the three issues that the world has a very powerful shared interest in and where some beginning steps should be possible in the short term.

 

Sean Nelson:  Thank you. And so, Ben or Roya, if you'd like to pick up those concluding remarks.

 

Benedict Rogers:  If I could just make a few concluding remarks with particular respect to North Korea. There's a question about whether the areas that we could potentially see some progress in. I will apply that question to North Korea, and I think that I've long felt that the humanitarian sector is one area where there are opportunities, and it's already happened to some extent and potentially, tragically, of course, but potentially as a result of the pandemic, there may be -- I'm sure there will be a need and there may be an openness for engagement in the humanitarian sector.

 

      Clearly, that has to be done in a way that minimizes the risk of legitimizing the regime and certainly the risk of humanitarian funding going into the hands of the regime. But if it can be done in a way that does minimize those risks, that is potentially an opening into North Korea.

 

      In the field of human rights, it's often said that there is already some progress on the -- if you'd like, the less political rights, particularly in terms of disability rights. There are various initiatives in that field. That's not the field I work in, but I'm aware of others who are. And they say that a little bit more of a door that they can push on that, which potentially could lead into the bigger human rights picture. And I'm supportive of that approach, although I would caveat it by saying we must not let the bigger and much more egregious human rights issues go.

 

      That leads me to my penultimate point which is we must not let the UN Commission of Inquiry report, which is now seven years old and which was an incredibly impressive and damning piece of work, we must not let that gather dust on a shelf. That should serve as a manifesto for action, not a sort of academic study that sits on a shelf.

 

      And then my last point in terms of going forward out of this pandemic, clearly, on both sides of the Atlantic, the question of how we engage with China and specifically with the Chinese Communist party regime, is one of the biggest issues of the day for all of us. And I hope there will be some fundamental rethinking in terms of looking at the danger that the Chinese regime poses to the world, looking at the repression that it's carrying out on its own people.

 

But that also has to be balanced with the knowledge that on certain issues, we need, at least to a certain extent, to still be able to work with China. And so that balance of confronting China much more, which I fully support, but at the same time, trying to find ways not to have -- for example, you don't want to have North Korea turned into an absolute battleground diplomatically between the West and China, although it may already be so. But that I think is one of the big questions that we'll have to grapple with in the months and years ahead.

 

Sean Nelson:  Thank you, Ben. And, Roya, if you can make some brief remarks.

 

Roya Hakakian:  I think the international community, the West, the U.S. and Europe, have not exhausted the possibilities of using certain shticks, for lack of a better word, that has in the past shown to be incredibly effective with Iran, far more than any treaty or negotiation has done.

 

      And with the example of the trial that I mentioned and the possibility that exists now about the campaign against air travel to Iran until the accountability for the Ukrainian Airbus has been done, I think there are avenues that have shown in the past historically that have helped the civil society in Iran greatly where the international community's interest and Iran's interest overlap.

 

      Another example is FIFA. Iran cares a great deal about holding soccer matches in its stadiums. However, FIFA should make sure that everybody, both genders, men and women, are able to attend. And if they do not abide by this requirement from FIFA, Iran should not hold any soccer games. It's very simple.

 

There are certain places where the interest of Iran, where the things that it really cares about providing the public with, in this case soccer, in the case of the trial, having relations with Europe, and the interests of the West overlap. And it is in those places of overlap that if they look hard enough, we can find reasons, we can find ways to pressure Iran into behaving the way that would be beneficial to the human rights community.

 

Sean Nelson:  Well, thank you, Roya, and thank you to all of our panelists. I think it's been just a fantastic discussion. And we've covered a lot of ground from really delving into the framework for thinking through these issues to very specific applications and to the road forward.

 

      So I'm going to pass it back to Micah, but I especially want to thank all of the listeners out there for calling in and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

 

Micah Wallen:  And on behalf of The Federalist Society, I'd like to thank all of our experts for the benefit of their valuable time and expertise today. We welcome listener feedback by email at [email protected]. Thank you all for joining us. We are adjourned.

 

[Music]

 

Dean Reuter:  Thank you for listening to this episode of Teleforum, a podcast of The Federalist Society’s practice groups. For more information about The Federalist Society, the practice groups, and to become a Federalist Society member, please visit our website at fedsoc.org.