OSAKA -- The plight of Japanese citizens and Japanese-born Koreans who voluntarily went to North Korea in the 1960s but escaped to return to Japan is a human rights issue that needs to be included in the six-party talks on denuclearizing North Korea, a symposium in Osaka concluded Sunday.
Sponsored by the Amnesty International Korea Team and the Osaka-based Korea NGO Center, the symposium addressed recent efforts by the international community to deal with North Korea in the wake of its October nuclear test. Panelists included academic experts on North Korea, Japan-based Korean nongovernmental organizations and freelance journalists who cover Korean residents in Japan and North Korea itself.
With the six-party talks, which involve the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, possibly resuming next month, Teruo Komaki, head of Kokushikan University's 21st Century Asia Department and an expert on North Korea, said assumptions by some in Washington and Tokyo that tougher sanctions will lead to the collapse of North Korea are mistaken.