Pyongyang attacked the United Nations on Saturday after being accused of “cruel human rights abuses” against its people before the Security Council, calling North Korean defectors “scum”, according to the official KCNA.
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Thursday’s UN Security Council meeting, which involved the North Korean regime, was “an insult and a violation” of the spirit of the United Nations charter, said a spokesman for the Korean Association for Human Rights Studies, quoted anonymously by KCNA .
Pyongyang “denounces and strongly opposes the UN Security Council for harming the human rights situation in a particular country,” this spokesman added.
“The people of the DPRK [République populaire démocratique de Corée] He knows his human rights situation well and judges it fairly himself,” he continued.
The North Korean defectors are “scum who fled after leaving their homeland, their parents, their wives and their children just to save their filthy lives,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
The said meeting, held at the request of the US, which will chair the Security Council in August, denounced the North Korean regime’s human rights abuses against its people in order to carry out its arms programs.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, explained via video link “the large-scale use of forced labor” to support “the state’s military apparatus and its ability to manufacture weapons”.
Ilhyeok Kim, a young “civil society representative” who fled North Korea and whose family took refuge in South Korea, testified before the council in New York about the “isolation” of the North Korean people and the “penalties” inflicted on them.
He claimed to have been forced from an early age to work in the fields without pay in order to obtain crops intended exclusively for the army.
“The government turns our blood and sweat into a life of luxury for executives and rockets that shoot our hard work into the sky,” he said in English. “The money spent on a single rocket could feed us for three months,” Ilhyeok Kim said.
The two-hour public session devoted solely to North Korea’s “human rights abuses” was the first in the Security Council on the subject since 2017.
No delegate from Pyongyang was present.