24 Firstly, there is a tendency in existing research to base the examination and study of human rights violations mainly on legal criteria. Certainly, problems of human rights abuses can be analyzed on the legal level. However, it is an essential property of human rights problems that they cannot be reduced to the legal dimension. In fact, the laws and systems relating to human rights are in themselves limited by a weakness: not only do they have difficulties in fully including marginal people who live in human rights blind spots, but socially disadvantaged persons and minorities also find it hard to uncover human rights abuses in a detailed manner. Therefore, research that inquires both into human rights abuses encountered by North Korean refugee women and into human rights problems relating to the female subject has to be carried out in a way that thoroughly understands and reflects the ontological conditions of women; this makes it necessary to adopt a different, a new perspective, methodology, and epistemology. Secondly, the most frequent and serious problem posed by existing fact-finding studies on the nexus of human rights and North Korea is that of securing the ‘objectivity’ of research findings. The question of whether the contents of fact-finding studies on North Korean human rights are objective or not is one which has been raised continuously. Thus, in order to overcome such disputes over objectivity, it is essential to develop an epistemological approach, empirical research method, etc. that can objectively illuminate the conditions of North Korean human rights. The question of objectivity involves another problem, i.e. ‘fact-finding’. In existing situation studies on North Korean human rights, ‘facts’ which can by no means be verified/falsified are mixed together with ‘facts’ that have not been directly experienced by the narrator or researcher but are based on hearsay, thus rendering the validation of the material impossible. This point leads to yet another problem. Instead of concentrating their efforts on ‘talking facts’, some existing studies of North Korean human rights display a tendency to transform ‘selective material’ into ‘highly representative facts’, thus making the whole fact-finding study more or less exemplary; this problematic trend has been constantly pointed out in the literature. In such cases, researchers’ ‘calculated