Transitional Justice in North Korea Following a Change of Regime: An Exploration of Four Possible Scenarios

Abstract

A great deal of research and writing on transitional justice issues has been produced over the past decade focused on the collapse of abusive regimes in the aftermath of civil wars in which there were widespread atrocities and war crimes against the civil population. The issues are extraordinarily complex (e.g., the interrelationship between economic forces at work in an unstable environment affects levels of violence), full of policy trade-offs between conflicting objectives (e.g., imperatives of short-term stability vs. demands for justice from the aggrieved), and the difficulties of building resilient justice institutions that are capable of implementing policies and creating the rule of law in unstable environments (e.g., the prosecution of crimes against humanity is best done by local institutions and yet they often do not exist in failed or fragile states). While most definitions of transitional justice have focused on the implementation of justice during the transition period of one regime to another, I propose in this chapter a broader definition of transitional justice to include the creation of a modern judicial system, the rule of law, and of establishment of civil peace so I can comment on other critical issues during a transitional period in North Korea.¹

* Director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs and Executive Professor, George H.W. Bush School of Government, Texas A and M University.