9 The Emergence of Five North Korean Defector-Activists in Transnational Activism Jay Song Three of the objectives of this volume are to identify the main actors working on the issue of North Korean human rights violations, identify their networks, and track discursive changes within these networks. This chapter focuses on North Korean defectors or refugees as one of the main drivers to shape and transform international discourses on North Korean human rights, using their social and professional networks across national borders. 1 The ultimate goal of this transna- tional activism would be the North Korean regime changing its state behavior and fully complying with international human rights law. While activists all share this goal, they differ on the means of its achievement: some argue for regime collapse; others for the referral of Kim Jong Un to the ICC; still others have focused their energies on the creation of three international institutional establishments. The first of these was the 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act, signed in the United States; the second was the 2004 appointment of Vitit Muntarbhorn as first UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the DPRK/North Korea; and the third was the 2013 establishment of the COI by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate human rights in North Korea. The COI published their report in 2014, accusing the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, of committing serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity, and calling for referral of the case to the ICC. 2 1 This chapter is a revised version of an article published in Australian Journal of International Affairs and is reproduced here with permission. See Song 2017. The author would like to thank Edward Baker, Roland Bleiker, Sandra Fahy, Andrew Yeo, Danielle Chubb, and Markus Bell for reading the earlier versions of this paper and providing extremely helpful comments. She would also like to thank Jinyoung Lee for her research assistance and those who were interviewed for this study. 2 South Korea and Japan have also passed domestic legislation pertaining to North Korean Human Rights. However, for the purposes of analysis in this chapter, these are not considered. The US legislation had significant influence on the trajectory of North Korean human rights 201 Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108589543.011 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Melbourne Library, on 23 Dec 2018 at 01:32:49, subject to the Cambridge