[38 North] Beyond the Blanket Ban: Reframing the International Response to North Korea’s Overseas Labor

31 Oct 2025

On October 28, 2025 38 North published NKDB human rights researcher Unique Kim's column further updating the transnational labor exploitation issue of North Korean workers dispatched to Russia. Ms. Kim argued that the current sanctions regime on Russia has failed to regulate the exploitative import of labor from North Korea, and thus international cooperation must reorganize and seek an effective solution to address this identified human rights problem, whether by revising the sanctions approach or by introducing an entirely different approach.

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