With the international community ratcheting up criticism, North Korea is intensifying efforts to defend its human rights record through a U.N. resolution, investigative report and dialogue with its traditional partners.
Pyongyang is working on a draft to be presented to the U.N. General Assembly that calls for an end to resolutions that it claims are aimed solely at interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries and deepening confrontation and mistrust in the international community, Seoul officials said Monday.
The unprecedented move is apparently designed to counter a separate text being written chiefly by the European Union and Japan. To be put to a vote in the coming weeks, the draft calls for efforts to address the dismal living conditions in the communist country in line with the recommendations of a bombshell U.N. Commission of Inquiry report released in February.
The North has been circulating a letter to the U.N. nations unveiling its plans, the officials said. It reportedly criticized the forthcoming EU-Japan resolution as “confrontational” and its own text will introduce the country’s free education and medical care, as well as “recent positive measures” to mend relations with the South.
Yet it remains to be seen whether Pyongyang will push ahead and propose the document to the human rights committee and then the plenary session, given the low likelihood of support.
“North Korea seems to be targeting the members of the Non-Aligned Movement and its goal is to say no to country-specific resolutions on human rights,” a senior official at the Foreign Ministry here told reporters on customary condition of anonymity, adding that Seoul and Western countries have not yet received the letter.
“But there are risks ― if (North Korea) ends up not gaining sufficient votes to pass its resolution, it will come back with egg all over its face and questions about the legitimacy of its claims.”
The official also ruled out the possibility of the final EU-Japan resolution carrying the recommendations of the COI report or the Human Rights Council resolution adopted in March. The text could be somewhat watered down to win more endorsement in light of regular practices.
The survey calls on the Security Council to refer North Korea’s situation to the International Criminal Court and impose “targeted sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible for crimes against humanity.” The council resolution recommended that the General Assembly submit the COI report to the Security Council and the North Korean situation be brought to the “appropriate international criminal justice mechanism.”
In his General Assembly address late last month, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Su-yong blasted the U.N.’s “high-handedness and arbitrariness veiled under the various disguises,” citing democracy, humanitarian crises, counterterrorism, human rights protection and nonproliferation.
In attempts to soothe global criticism, Pyongyang recently released its own lengthy report on its human rights record and publicly acknowledged the existence of labor camps for the first time, though it denied the operation of any prison camps.
Kang Sok-ju, secretary of the Central Committee of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party, is believed to have requested a lowering of the level of criticism in the EU-Japan resolution during his visit to Brussels in late September.
“(North Korea) is apparently feeling uncomfortable about their problems being mentioned in the context of not only the General Assembly but also the Security Council and ‘international criminal justice mechanism,’ so it is striving to counter and block the drive or at least prevent sensitive parts from being stipulated in the resolution,” the official added.
By Shin Hyon-hee (
heeshin@heraldcorp.com)
