3 basis of legal criteria, more particularly, by aligning them according to provisions of international human rights treaties. While such studies have their merits, the vivid and human suffering that North Korean refugee women have to cope with as a result of human rights violations vanishes when subsumed under legal concepts or the articles of human rights conventions. This research, on the other hand, tried to approach and understand violations of North Korean refugee women’s human rights through the lively narrations of these women themselves, through their bodies and minds. By unearthing the injuries human rights violations have left on the bodies and minds of these refugee women, we attempted to show that human rights issues are not only social problems of law and systems but constitute an existential issue for living human beings. In the course of reconstructing, with regard to the temporal and spatial continuity of human rights violations, the lives of North Korean refugee women who have experienced human rights abuses, we were able to grasp the various structural and psychological factors that inflict human rights violations on these women. Not only did the experience of severe human rights conditions in North Korea drive them out of the country, but, moreover, it did not allow these women to develop a self that would have enabled them to counter the human rights violations they were confronted with in China and third countries. Furthermore, North Korean refugee women, having been marginalised as ‘illegal migrants’ in China and third countries, could not turn to any law or system to seek protection. Under such conditions, these women were to suffer even more severe human rights violations which eventually left deep wounds on their bodies and minds. It is precisely this ‘trauma’ that turns North Korean refugee women into beings vulnerable to human rights violations. Even when North Korean refugee women have made their way to South Korea, the human rights violations they face here are, in many cases, connected to the wounds previously inscribed in their bodies and minds. Once we turn our attention to the traumas experienced by North Korean refugee women, human rights cannot be reduced merely to an issue of the laws or system of state or society. Rather, human rights emerge as an issue pertaining to the body and