North Korea slams US ‘anti-people empire of evils’ in attack on Washington-led human rights push at UN

A Pyongyang official warned any countries ‘blindly following the US’ to ‘behave themselves’ amid plans for a Security Council meeting on North Korea

Washington’s ambassador to the UN said the council ‘must address the horrors, the abuses and the crimes being perpetrated’ by Kim Jong-un’s regime

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Members of the United Nations Security Council hold a meeting on North Korea in October last year, after a ballistic missile was fired over Japan for the first time in five years. Photo: Reuters

Published: 10:39am, 16 Aug 2023Updated: 10:46am, 16 Aug 2023

North Korea has denounced US-led plans for an open meeting of the United Nations’ Security Council on its human rights record as “despicable” and only aimed at achieving Washington’s geopolitical ambitions.

Pyongyang’s Foreign Vice-Minister Kim Son-gyong called the United States a “declining” power and said if the council dealt with any country’s human rights, the US should be the first “as it is the anti-people empire of evils, totally depraved due to all sorts of social evils”.

The US, which holds the Security Council presidency this month, scheduled the meeting on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name, for Thursday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un holds an assault rifle during an inspection of the country’s munitions factories earlier this month. Photo: Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP

It will be the first open council meeting on the DPRK rights issue since 2017. US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters last week that UN human rights chief Volker Türk and Elizabeth Salmon, the UN’s independent investigator on human rights in reclusive North Korea, would brief council members.

The Security Council “must address the horrors, the abuses and crimes being perpetrated” by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s regime against its own people as well as the people of Japan and South Korea, Thomas-Greenfield, flanked by the ambassadors from Albania, Japan and South Korea, said when making the announcement.

Nate Evans, the spokesman for the US Mission to the United Nations, responded to Kim Son-gyong’s remarks by reiterating that North Korea’s ongoing human rights violations and abuses “go against the very principles of the UN Charter and are directly linked to Pyongyang’s unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes.”

“North Koreans are suffering while the DPRK regime diverts a large share of its budget and resources to weapons development,” Evans said in a statement.

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