Seoul refuses to duplicate 'Helsinki Process' on N.K. human rights

South Korea's point man on North Korea on Monday rejected international calls, mainly from the United States, for pursuing a multilateral agreement to help improve dismal human rights conditions in the Stalinist state.

"Personally, I oppose a Northeast Asian version of the Helsinki Process," Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok told a parliamentary committee on unification, foreign affairs and trade.

The Helsinki Process refers to a 1975 agreement between the U.S. and 34 other Western nations in which the countries pledged to make human rights their top policy regarding the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries.

A coalition of U.S. human rights groups called on Washington last week to seek a Northeast Asian version of the Helsinki Process while dealing with Pyongyang.

The call also came amid apparent efforts by several U.S. legislators, as well as officials, to include the human rights issue in international negotiations over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

"If security is the only topic of conversation, we hold ourselves hostage to a brutal dictator's periodic demands for attention," said Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas.

"Instead, we should set our eyes on the goal of democratic reform," he told reporters following a public hearing last week involving six North Korean defectors admitted to the U.S. as refugees, the first to be granted refugee status following the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004.

The South Korean minister dismissed the call, claiming such efforts would have little or no effect on the North.

"Because there is a wide perception that the Helsinki Process is premised on a regime change, (applying the process to North Korea) would have no effect," Lee told the National Assembly committee.

He said the process itself could be theoretically viable, but the problem is "who raises the issue."

"In the U.S., the people who have been calling for a change of the North Korean regime are raising the issue," Lee said.

South Korea and its allies have held five rounds of the negotiations with North Korea since the nuclear dispute erupted in late 2002, but Pyongyang has been staying away from the multilateral talks since November, citing what it claims to be U.S. attempts to isolate and topple its communist regime.

The talks also involve the U.S., Japan, China and Russia.

Seoul, July 24 (Yonhap News)