Why North Korea probably won't change after U.N. report

North Korea: UN report a political plot

It's hard to imagine a more powerful indictment of a government's behavior than the one just handed down by a U.N. panel tasked with investigating human rights in North Korea.

In a 372-page report, the Commission of Inquiry on Democratic People's Republic of Korea outlined harrowing claims of "extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape ... and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation."

After years of flouting international pressure over its nuclear program, it's unclear whether these latest allegations are any more likely to alter Pyongyang's behavior. And while there has already been speculation over how things might play out differently this time, many analysts remain skeptical about the prospects for change.

Will China please stand up?

China is widely seen as having more leverage over North Korea than any other country, not least because it is a vital source of resources. China supplies its neighbor with virtually all of its fuel needs and some 80 percent of all its imports.

"China holds the very survival of the Kim (Jong Un) regime in its hands," argues Stephen Yates, deputy assistant to the vice president for national security affairs in the George W. Bush administration.

"North Korea's access to energy, food, and finance is heavily dependent on China," says Yates, now CEO of the consultancy firm DC International Advisory. "Beijing also has decades of relatively close party-to-party and military-to-military relations with Pyongyang, which should be a great advantage in terms of understanding and influencing North Korea's leadership. And of course China is home to hundreds of thousands of North Korean migrants (perhaps more) who earn a living in China while bringing currency and goods back to North Korea."

But as John S. Park, a Northeast Asia specialist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argues, Beijing is unlikely to back a push for more sanctions anytime soon.

"The Chinese government has already contested the key findings of the Commission's report," Park says. "It's highly unlikely that Beijing will support targeted sanctions" aimed at members of the regime.

"It would be nice to see the five members of the Six Party talks express support for the report, though there's little chance of China doing this," agrees Victor Cha, author of "Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future" and a former director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council.

So what's behind China's reticence? As the Council on Foreign Relations notes, China has generally resisted the imposition of tough international sanctions on its neighbor in hopes of "avoiding regime collapse and an influx of refugees across their shared 800-mile border."

And China's Foreign Ministry was certainly quick to dismiss the possibility of taking action over the commission's findings.

"Of course we cannot accept this unreasonable criticism," Reuters quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying as saying. "We believe that politicizing human-rights issues is not conducive towards improving a country's human rights."

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