In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Jay Lefkowitz, U.S. President George W. Bush’s Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, suggests to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama that he challenge North Korea directly about its human rights record, strongly suggesting that Obama package human rights together with economic aid and apply something like the Helsinki Process to Pyongyang.

Who would ever question the urgent need to improve human rights in North Korea? The problem here, however, is Lefkowitz’s self-serving interpretation of what the Helsinki Process is.

The Helsinki Process refers to the process of carrying out the Helsinki Final Act on security cooperation in Europe, signed by 35 NATO and Warsaw Pact member states in 1975. The agreement lists ten principles and confidence building measures in three areas.

Unlike what Lefkowitz claims, however, human rights were not a major point of contention. While respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms is one of the ten principles mentioned, respect for sovereignty, refraining from the threat or use of force, the inviolability of frontiers, the peaceful settlement of disputes, non-intervention in internal affairs, and good faith obligations under international law were given more weight.

Central to the agreement were three “baskets.” The first basket was about building confidence on military matters. The second addressed cooperation in the fields of economics, of science and technology, and of the environment. The third basket was about cooperation in humanitarian and other fields. What needs to be noticed here is that improving human rights was not once mentioned in any of the three, and that only exchange and cooperation in the areas of personnel, information, culture and education were emphasized. So sensitive were the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe about human rights at the time of the Helsinki Process that the issue was approached with care, and it was then balanced with inclusion of the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs.

It was only in the nineties, after the fall of Eastern Europe, that the Helsinki Process began dealing with human rights in earnest. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe was created in 1989, and out of it grew, in 1990, the Copenhagen Document, central to which was the promotion of human rights and democracy in Eastern Europe. The OSCE made central executive organization called the “Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights” at that time. During the Cold War you had the Helsinki Process, which emphasized mutual trust on military matters and the promotion of economic, social, cultural, and human exchange for openness and reform, and it was only after the end of the Cold War order that human rights and democracy was made an issue front and center.

The lesson to be learned from that is that a gradual Helsinki-style approach, one that takes time, would be more effective than Lefkowitz’s stronger prescription for improving North Korea’s human rights situation. For starters, North Korea needs to be given reassurance, in a bilateral or multilateral format, along the lines of its sovereignty and territory, non-aggression and non-intervention in internal affairs. While simultaneously encouraging voluntary change on the North’s part through more active economic, scientific and technological, environmental, and socio-cultural exchange, there needs to be prudence pressuring it on democracy and human rights before internal conditions there are mature.

Omnidirectional pressure on human rights targeting a society like that of North Korea will not only be of little effectiveness, it will make establishing mutual trust on military matters and peaceful coexistence difficult by attacking it with “reunification by absorption” that would mean a change in the system there. The Obama administration should take this into account and use a European-style Helsinki process, instead of the Lefkowitz approach.

The views presented in this column are the writer's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.