North Korea reacts strongly as UN Human Rights Council passes resolution

Members of the U.N. Security Council meeting listen as Volker Turk, unseen, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, speaks during a meeting on the situation in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, Aug. 17, 2023. AFP-Yonhap

North Korea bristled at the U.N. Human Rights Council's (UNHRC) adoption this week of a resolution denouncing its human rights abuses, calling the resolution "nothing but a politically motivated fraud document."

Kim Son-gyong, vice minister for international organizations at the North's foreign ministry, criticized the resolution in a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency, Friday.

The council adopted the resolution for the 22nd consecutive year at its 55th regular session in Geneva, Thursday (local time). It denounced the North's human rights violations and called for countries to respect the principle of non-refoulement.

"I scathingly denounce the "human rights resolution" fabricated by the U.S. and its followers with the ulterior intention to overthrow the sovereignty of the dignified DPRK and its socialist system, as a grave infringement upon the DPRK's sovereignty and an act of interference in its internal affairs," she said in the statement.

DPRK stands for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Kim also claimed, "The 'resolution' invented on the initiative of the forces hostile to the DPRK is nothing but a politically motivated fraud document run through with all sorts of lies and tricks to unreasonably slander our state's policy on ensuring genuine human rights and its actual situation."

The UNHRC has adopted a resolution condemning the North's human rights abuses every year since 2003. (Yonhap)