25 questions’, tailored to ascertain selective facts, may severely jeopardise the objectivity and balance of the situation study. Thirdly, existing research on North Korean human rights tends to show little consideration for the question of ‘time’ in which human rights issues manifest themselves. What emerges as problematic is, for example, that human rights issues which occurred in North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s are, by transcending time, depicted as current issues; or the respective contexts in which human rights issues developed in the 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century are arbitrarily jumbled and described without differentiating between these time periods. When employing an approach that is not attentive to different temporal frames, it becomes very difficult to draw on and analyze qualitative differences between environments that cause human rights problems in respective time periods. It is therefore advisable for future research to arrange and analyze cases of human rights violations against North Korean refugee women in terms of their appearance in and over time. Fourthly, the currently existing research shows an inclination to overlook the structural causes of the development of human rights problems in North Korea. Apart from a few studies (such as the research conducted by the Korea Institute for National Unification), most research does not trace the various factors leading, in multiple ways, to problematic human rights situations. To be more precise, North Korean human rights violations concerning rights to freedom tend to be influenced by the nature of the North Korean system (characteristics of a socialist system of the 20th century combined with the characteristics of North Korea’s patriarchal system), while infringements of social rights tend to appear in connection with the post-1990s economic conditions in North Korea (food shortages, economic difficulties and severe famines). The various causeand-effect relationships evolving between such systematic and structural factors and the reality of human rights violations should therefore be closely examined and analyzed. Failure to do so will decisively impede our search for the factors causing the