Dear President Trump, Human Rights Is the Card to Play With North Korea

If you thought North Korea had improved its abysmal human-rights record in recent years, it's understandable. President Donald Trump has met directly with the gulag state's dictator, Kim Jong Un, twice in eight months, praising him as a "talented man" who "loves his country very much."This week in Vietnam in negotiations over the denuclearization of North Korea, Trump once again touted his "special relationship" with Kim, saying "a lot of things will be solved" during the summit in Hanoi.We applaud the Trump administration's efforts to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, end the testing of ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. and its allies, and tone down the president's 2017 promise to unleash "fire and fury" on the North Korean people if their leaders threatened the U.S. again.But by maintaining what Amnesty International calls a "deafening silence" on the human-rights violations of more than 25 million North Koreans, the president has missed an opportunity to link the Kim regime's totalitarian repression of its own people with the lifting of U.S. sanctions and a place at the table with what was once referred to as "the leader of the Free World."  Continue reading...