According to today’s Sunday Express,
A group of 46 North Korean “journalists” are on a UK study course in media skills funded by the Foreign Office… Lord Alton of Liverpool, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, accused the Foreign Office of “investing in people who are official mouthpieces of the regime”…The Foreign Office has refused to confirm how much it is spending on the project, officially called “Inside Out: Working in North Korea to connect its journalists to the internet world”. It is part of its £20million Human Rights and Democracy Programme that spends an average of £70,000 per project.
Full story here. While it’s possibly predictable that the Express might not approve of training North Korean journalists, and Lord Alton is rightly critical of the regime for its human rights abuses, giving “mouthpieces of the regime” an insight into how a free press works seems to be a low-cost form of engagement which is consistent with other initiatives designed to open the eyes of North Koreans about how the world outside differs from life in Pyongyang.