The Korea Times
By Philip Dorsey Iglauer, Staff Reporter
Lee Hae-young has leveraged her education, career and passion promoting the human rights of women and children in Asia.
In the years pursuing a career in the human rights field, Lee said she saw that the issue of North Korean human rights is dividing development assistance practitioners and human rights activists. She also saw a division between the slow upgrade of economic rights through raising living standards and high-profile advocacy of political rights.
Lee sought a middle ground by co-founding the Blanket and Sponge Project in Asia (BASPIA), a non-government organization that works for the protection of the rights of women and children in Asia by integrating human rights advocacy with development assistance. For Lee, the group’s name says it all: ``Blanket’’ symbolizes humanitarian and practical assistance and ``sponge’’ signifies the prevention of conflict through absorbing personal, social and regional tension.
``Human rights people work on human rights and development people work on development,’’ Lee said in an interview with The Korea Times in her office in Yoido. ``If they really were focusing on their respective subjects, then they would cooperate with one another, but they don’t.’’
She said the group seeks to combine the agendas of human rights and development assistance. According to Lee, it was only in the past five to 10 years that the international community has come to realize the importance of what is called a ``human rights-based approach to development assistance.’’
``After all, human rights seem abstract without first lifting these people out of their poverty,’’ she added.
Passion as Profession
One might think Lee was a political activist her whole life with one look around the narrow office crowded with computer workstations, reams of rolled up posters and a single round table cluttered with papers and art supplies.
The tiny office’s book shelves brimming with books on human rights law, North Korea and technical manuals such as ``Human Rights: A Compilation of International Instruments’’ and the ``2005 International Seminar on North Korea Human Rights.’’
She majored in English language and literature at Korea University and studied international politics at Korea University’s Graduate School of International Studies.
She was a student journalist with the university’s magazine ``The Granite Tower’’ at its international affairs division. A formative experience for her was an article she wrote in 1995 on famine in Somalia.
The writing of that article sparked in Lee an interest in why social problems occur, the context in which human rights violations happen. But that was not what led her into a career of activism.
What inspired Lee, the eldest of five children, to pursue NGO work was an internship with the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong in 2001.
``I got to meet many activists and lawyers from all over Asia,’’ she said. ``I was impressed with the fact that although this NGO was small, it was very effective, professional and friendly. So, I became more interested in the NGO field.’’
Then she worked as a program officer at the Citizen’s Alliance for North Korean Human Rights from 2002-2004.
Lee and her three full-time program officers, with the help of the group’s 25 volunteers, are studying the Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative Against Trafficking (COMMIT) in an international effort of six countries in the Greater Mekong Sub-region that have been coordinating government work since 2004 to stop international human trafficking.
``We want to eventually replicate what they did in Northeast Asia, while at the same time support the good work of selected local NGOs there,’’ she said.
She added that the group is ``focusing on the human rights of women and children across Asia.’’
She said BASPIA is looking into what role NGOs can play in supporting COMMIT and also local NGOs through financing them with a ``BAS Asian Fund,’’ which they plan to launch in June, to mobilize financial resources in Korea and Japan.
In Korea, BAPSIA organized its first seminar, Wednesday, on integrating two rights approaches titled ``Harmony Between Human Rights and Development,’’ in which 30 NGO practitioners from human rights and development groups participated. BASPIA also works on several human rights education campaigns.
Stuck in the Middle
Lee said she started BASPIA because she became tired of the ideological bickering between development assistance practitioners and some North Korean rights activists.
``North Korean human rights are the real divide between humanitarian and human rights groups,’’ she said.
She said politically motivated Christian groups in South Korea and in Washington, D.C. are manipulating some missionaries and Christian groups in China to get to the North Korean defectors so they can get information to hurt or embarrass North Korea.
``I feel that me and my group stuck between these two sides, between politically motivated Christian groups and these development assistance groups.’’
Asked about doing NGO work in China, Lee said, ``People think there is no way to work in China, so they do not even try. They just criticize from South Korea or from Washington, D.C,’’ she said.
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