50 This fact also means that human rights violations within North Korea are expanding in multiple and continued forms. Certainly, there are also views that emphasize the diversity of motives for fleeing North Korea, e.g. supported by the interpretation that, in recent years, many refugees of the ‘well-being type’ have left North Korea in pursuit of a better life. But such a suggestion cannot override the view that the North Korean system is not yet able to implement the improvements required to consistently provide basic protection of human rights and address the life conditions of its residents. The fact that women still make up the majority of North Korean refugees evidences that North Korea has failed so far to sufficiently ameliorate the human rights situation and life conditions of women who constitute one vulnerable social stratum in North Korean society. From this point of view, it is not unreasonable to consider the development of the figures of North Korean women fleeing the country as a ‘barometer’ which directly and indirectly indicates the state of human rights in North Korea. The reason for explaining the actual human rights environment of women in North Korea through the aspect of ‘structuralization’ is as follows: The current human rights environment of North Korean women cannot be simply and entirely explained as a phenomenon resulting from the economic crisis of the 1990s. Rather, and when considering the bigger picture, it has to be understood as a phenomenon that arises from a combination of the structure of human rights violations retained from before the 1990s and the worsened socio-economic reality following the economic crisis of the 1990s; and the intensity of this combination appeared in a more structuralized form in the first decade of the 21st century. In other words, patterns of human rights violations have diversified, the scale of infringements has expanded, and modes of violations have become more systematic. This structuralization and diversification of human rights violations emerges due to a structure of systematic human rights violations that has persisted from before the 1990s in combination with the ‘routinization of economic plight’ which has now continued for almost 15 years. From a socio-economic perspective, the ‘routinization of economic plight’ refers to the fact that the state has not been able to normalize the