For more than twenty years North Korea’s nuclear development and human rights abuses have concerned the international society, particularly the United States, South Korea, and Japan. After the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK released its report in 2014, concerns about human rights in North Korea entered a new phase in relation to Northeast Asia’s multilateral cooperation and inter-Korean relations. Multilateral cooperation on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia, however, has not reached any kind of consensus for improving the condition of human rights in North Korea. This paper reviews the past twenty years of multilateral and bilateral efforts to tackle the problem of North Korean human rights and analyses the disputes between conservatives and progressives regarding South Korea’s policy toward North Korea.