State-sponsored abductions and political imprisonments remain serious violations of human rights warranting accountability, said Tae-Ung Baik, former director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii.
“Without protecting human rights, without re-establishing the human rights system, there is no peace—no permanent peace—and sound democracy possible at all,” Baik said.
Boston College’s Global Korea Project hosted Baik on Thursday to discuss his work with the United Nations (U.N.) and his advocacy for domestic implementation of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, a treaty focused on preventing state-sponsored abductions.
Baik, who served as the chair-rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) from 2020 to 2021, detailed how his work with the U.N. is able to foster transitional justice.
Transitional justice refers to a process by which governments provide political redress, reparations, and reconciliation to victims of human rights violations, according to the U.N.“We ensure the documentation, and we report to the Human Rights Council and U.N. General Assembly,” Baik said. “We monitor the state compliances, sometimes by official country visits.”
The U.N. uses a two-tier system when assisting families of enforced disappearance victims, Baik explained, categorizing cases as either urgent or standard procedure.
A case falls under urgent procedure if the disappearance occurred within three months of being reported, prompting the U.N. to immediately contact the involved country. Cases reported after this three-month period are categorized as standard procedures handled by communicating with the host country on a case-by-case basis.
On a U.N.-sanctioned visit to Sri Lanka in 2015, Baik, a then-member of the WGEID, encountered families of individuals who went missing during the Sri Lankan Civil War that concluded in 2009.
“We met eight victims, many of those family members got the first information interview, and that lady came to us [and] told me that she saw her husband being taken by a policeman in his town, in her town,” Baik said. “That policeman came to her saying that, ‘I know you are going to meet with the U.N. people, and you have two kids still, and they are in school. Be careful.’ Hearing the kind of threats she came still to meet with us, so you see how terrifying the situation [was]. But that is not isolated.”
Prior to his work with the U.N., Baik was a political prisoner of the South Korean government due to his affiliations with the South Korean Socialist Workers’ Alliance. According to Amnesty International, he was a prisoner of conscience, arrested for his political affiliation and beliefs, and held under interrogation for 22 days.
“When I was imprisoned, we were tortured,” Baik said. “I was tortured.”Regardless of his imprisonment, Baik emphasized that he does not consider himself a victim of human rights violations, but rather a fighter.
“People considered me as a victim of human rights violation, but I have never felt that I was a victim,” Baik said. “And before fighting for democracy, they never appeared themselves as a victim. Whether they are prison fighters, they want to transform the society, the whole society.”
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