UN committee slams North Korea's "inhuman" abuses
Posted: 20 November 2009 0947 hrs

	Photos  of

UNITED NATIONS: A UN General Assembly committee Thursday slammed North Korea human rights record as a cause for "serious concern" and cited the Stalinist nation's "inhuman" abuses.

The non-binding resolution from the United Nations General Assembly Third Committee on human rights expressed its "very serious concern" over the "systematic, widespread and grave violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."

The move was adopted by 96 votes to 19, with 65 abstentions, and could be presented at a later date before the full assembly, which comprises 192 nations.

The resolution accounts for a long list of rights violation, including "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment... inhuman conditions of detention, public executions, extrajudicial and arbitrary detention, the absence of due process and the rule of law."

The committee also singled out the death penalty for political and religious reasons and "the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labour."

North Korea's deputy UN representative Pak Tok-hun dismissed the findings by saying Pyongyang "categorically rejects the resolution."

The committee penned a "document of political conspiracy by hostile forces led by the United States," he said, adding that the aim was to "deny and obliterate the political system" of North Korea.

Last month Vitit Muntarbhorn, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said the country's record remains "abysmal" and noted that more than one third of its people go hungry despite abundant natural resources.

"The freedoms from want, from fear, from discrimination, from persecution and from exploitation are regrettably transgressed with impunity by those authorities, in an astonishing setting of abuse after abuse," Muntarbhorn said.

His report to the General Assembly said some nine million of the country's 24 million people go hungry, with the World Food Programme able to reach fewer than two million due to a shortfall in international aid.

- AFP/yb