WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Rice is set to name America’s first special envoy for human rights in North Korea, a country that President Bush last week singled out for its “concentration camps.”

One administration official and two sources outside the government told The New York Sun that Ms. Rice will name a former senior White House policy adviser, Jay Lefkowitz, to the job created last October when Mr. Bush signed the North Korea Human Rights Act. The little-noticed bill created the envoy position to raise awareness of and coordinate relief for a country whose prison camps are so vast that they are visible from space.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the issue yesterday. “When there is a designee for the position, we will make the announcement at that time,” Frederick Jones said.

The decision to name the envoy could signal the administration’s willingness to make the dearth of basic rights inside North Korea a major factor in six-party negotiations. Until now, the talks have focused almost exclusively on nuclear weapons.

The announcement would also follow a particularly tense week in America’s relationship with the regime. The North Korean military over the weekend tested a short-range missile, prompting Ms. Rice the following day to pronounce, “I don’t think there should be any doubt about our ability to deter whatever the North Koreans are up to.”

The short-range missile test followed unusually blunt words from Mr. Bush last Thursday at a press conference. He called the country’s leader, Kim Jong Il, “a man who starves his people.” The president added, “He’s got huge concentration camps.”

A year ago, such remarks could be dismissed as rhetoric intended to prod North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program through multiparty talks. And while the negotiations remain central to the president’s policy, the naming of an envoy focused on North Korean human rights suggests a renewed emphasis on the regime’s stark cruelty.

The new position, according to the North Korean Human Rights Act, has broad responsibility. Among Mr. Lefkowitz’s duties would be urging North Korea’s neighbors, Europe, and the United Nations to push Pyongyang to allow its people more freedoms. The envoy is also expected to discuss human rights directly with the regime.

Mr. Lefkowitz would make recommendations on funding pro-democracy groups inside North Korea and develop a plan to repatriate the thousands of refugees that flee the country to China every year. The Chinese have allowed North Korean agents to take their citizens back across the border to prison camps, where many die from hard labor and starvation.

“The most important thing this envoy should do is to make human rights a central part of any policy dealings with North Korea and work with defectors and nongovernmental organizations to save the lives of refugees,” a leading activist who pushed for the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act, Suzanne Scholte, said yesterday.

Ms. Scholte and other activists who worked on the legislation pointed out that it was also important that the new envoy be someone whom the president trusts. Mr. Lefkowitz, according to his colleagues, is highly regarded at the White House, where he served as general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget and director of the Domestic Policy Council. In 1990, Mr. Lefkowitz was an American delegate to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

“He was an assembler of policy,” a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, David Frum, said yesterday, meaning that Mr. Lefkowitz would often make sure policies were consistent with existing law. Mr. Frum called his friend “an excellent jack of all trades,” adding that in the president’s first term he was trusted to develop the White House position on stem cell research and drafting policy on financing terrorism.

The director of the religious action center, Rabbi David Saperstein, who has also worked to bring attention to the human rights crisis in North Korea, said Mr. Lefkowitz was qualified for the envoy position. “Jay has proved himself to be very wise politically, a great coalition builder, and he clearly has the trust of the president in the White House, and that is the most important characteristic of the envoy,” he said.

Mr. Lefkowitz, as is customary with nominees before they are announced, did not return phone calls to his office.