Speakers at an early March seminar organized by the disability rights group DULA International argued that the lives of the disabled had recently improved in North Korea.

There have been multiple reports from defectors of disabled people being victims of infanticide, separation from the rest of society, sterilization and even human experimentation on by the government. These issues were not addressed at the seminar on the March 2 at Trinity College, Cambridge. However, Kim Mun Chol, a North Korean representing the Korean Federation for the Protection of the Disabled (KFPD), tacitly acknowledged that provisions for the disabled were poor, speaking of “the Asian belief that the disabled are being punished for crimes in a previous life,” “the problem of 1990s when the state was focused on survival” and the “difficulties working between ministries.”