U.N. rights committee slams North Korea on its 'inhuman' abuses

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 labor.”

North Korea's deputy U.N. 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 U.N.'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 Program able to reach fewer than two million due to a shortfall in international aid.

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