WASHINGTON – As American and North Korean envoys engaged in a rare one-on-one meeting on the eve of six party talks the West hopes will persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program, more than 100 religious and human rights leaders called on President Bush to press the “Hermit Kingdom” to dismantle its gulags.

At a press conference yesterday, the coalition unveiled a statement of principles and an action plan aimed at making human rights in North Korea a priority for the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Last year, Congress passed and Mr. Bush signed the North Korean Human Rights Act, which created the position of human rights envoy to North Korea, but no candidate has yet been named. A former White House adviser, Jay Lefkowitz, is widely expected to be Mr. Bush’s choice for the job.

Formal talks among America, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia are scheduled to open today, but an American assistant secretary of state, Christopher Hill, spoke for 75 minutes with North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Kim Kye Gwan, yesterday according to the Associated Press. The AP reported that the two did not discuss specific issues, but rather addressed the framework of the dispute. For example, the AP said, the two envoys talked about what North Koreans mean when they say they want a nuclear-free peninsula.

The coalition of religious and rights representatives could put significant pressure on the Bush White House as many of its signers, such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Association of Evangelicals, tap into the president’s core constituency. The coalition also includes Muslim and Jewish leaders as well as the Korean-American Church Coalition and traditional human rights organizations like Freedom House.

Advising the new coalition from Washington is a Hudson Institute scholar and a former Reagan White House aide, Michael Horowitz, the same man who in the late 1990s assembled coalitions to help Sudanese Christians and Animists and pressured Congress to pass anti-trafficking laws in 2002.

The president of Korean Churches for North Korea, Steven Chang, yesterday compared the treatment of North Koreans to victims of domestic violence. He said that for years his community tried to deal with abuses in the North through the greater family of the Korean people. “But it has become more than a family issue and it has now become an issue for all of mankind,” he said.

North Korea is consistently rated by Freedom House as the least free country in the world. Mr. Bush has called out its leader, Kim Jong Il, for deliberately starving his people, and a handful of defectors from the country’s prison camps have described atrocities ranging from summary execution to guards allowing attack dogs to eat weakened prisoners alive.

Nonetheless, the six-party talks that begin today in Beijing are slated only to address Pyongyang’s violation of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. North Korea so far has publicly demanded a peace treaty with America, international aid, and full diplomatic relations. In exchange, the regime says it will abide by the treaty, which it signed, and begin to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, which it had promised the Clinton administration not to build.

The coalition’s statement yesterday specifically asked Mr. Bush to tie human rights progress by North Korea to any promise of American aid to the country. It also called for increased American pressure on China to end its practice of sending back North Korean asylum seekers. The coalition hopes America will urge China to re-establish its diplomatic negotiations with North Korea based on the parameters of the Helsinki accords, in which America pressed for access to Soviet prisons in the context of arms control talks and improved trade at the end of the Cold War.

The coalition statement forswears a military invasion: “We strongly believe military action is neither called for nor needed in order to improve the conditions of the North Korean people.”

It recommends the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia expand broadcasts into North Korea. Refugees from the country have said radios, which are wired to receive only state-run stations, can be rigged easily to transmit such American-funded channels.

One of the most intriguing recommendations from the coalition is to urge Congress to pass the “Scoop Jackson National Security and Freedom Act.” While no lawmaker has yet to introduce a bill named for the former senator from Washington state, who is widely considered a political godfather of the neoconservative movement, a draft of the legislation written by the coalition was provided to The New York Sun.

The bill would impose trade penalties on China if it continued to repatriate North Koreans who escaped to its territory, an approach almost identical to legislation Mr. Jackson drafted in the 1970s that punished the Soviet Union if it did not allow its Jewish refuseniks to emigrate freely.

Mr. Horowitz yesterday said he was hoping the Chinese would end the practice of returning fleeing North Koreans over the border. “The coalition has made a judgment that now is not the right time to push for this legislation,” he said. “We want to give China plenty of room to make their own decisions. But people are working on the bill. We have a rough draft. When the time comes, it may be introduced, but now is not the time to do it.”

China’s central bank has accumulated unprecedented sums of dollar-denominated assets such as treasury bonds in recent years, giving Beijing greater influence on American trade and foreign exchange policy than it enjoyed in the early 1990s.