Pyongyang criticizes Tokyo for covering up past with rights issues

‘It is an outrageous double standard that they ignored other serious human rights issues and mentioned our human rights.’


North Korea on Wednesday strongly denounced Japan, which jointly proposed with the EU a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council that condemned Pyongyang’s human rights violations.

The UNHRC unanimously adopted the resolution without a vote on Thursday last week, which included condemnation on the North’s abduction of Japanese nationals.

“Japan’s scheme to raise our human rights issues on the international stage using the abductions as a pretext is a foolish attempt to tactfully avoid clarifying its contentious past,” the North’s Korea Central News Agency said in a commentary.

“It is an outrageous double standard that they ignored other serious human rights issues and mentioned our human rights.”

Pointing to Koreans and “comfort women,” who were forcefully taken to Japan during its 1910-1945 colonial rule, the North said Japan’s touching on the North Korean human rights issue was “an attempt to cover up its disgraceful human rights violations in the past.”

The UNHRC adopted the resolution, which raised serious concern over the “precarious humanitarian situation in the country, exacerbated by its national policy priorities.”

South Korea’s foreign ministry officials said it was the first time that the UNHRC adopted the resolution on the North Korea situation by consensus, not by a vote.

To date, the resolution has been adopted by vote by the UNHRC and U.N. General Assembly every year since 2003, when the first of its kind was adopted by the commission.

In the past, Cuba used to take a leading role in opposing the resolution by requesting a vote.

This time, however, it did not request a vote.

“The adoption of the resolution without a vote is seen to have reaffirmed the concern of the international community over the grave human rights situation in North Korea,” the ministry said in a statement.

By Kim Yoon-mi (yoonmi@heraldcorp.com)