A top United Nations human rights investigator will visit South Korea next week in an effort to assess North Korea’s human rights abuses, Seoul’s foreign ministry said Friday.
Marzuki Darusman, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, will visit Seoul from Monday through Friday to meet government officials and human rights activists, the foreign ministry said.
The purpose of his visit is to collect information needed for a report to be submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. General Assembly, it added.
Darusman was appointed as the U.N. special rapporteur in 2010 with the task of probing the North’s human rights conditions and reporting the results and recommendations to the U.N.
He was also one of the three-member U.N. Commission of Inquiry
(COI) that published a report in February accusing Pyongyang of making “systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights.”
North Korea’s human rights issue has been in the spotlight as the European Union and Japan have been spearheading efforts to slam North Korea’s human rights conditions at the setting of the U.N.
They have written a draft resolution that calls for the Security Council to refer Pyongyang’s “crime against humanity” to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The resolution will be put to vote at the U.N. plenary session slated for late November.
North Korea proposed to invite him to visit North Korea on the condition that the wording of the ICC referral is dropped in the resolution, but Darusman has reportedly rejected such offer.
North Korea has bristled at any talk of its human rights situation, calling it a U.S.-led attempt to topple its regime. In September, the North released its own human rights report, claiming the country has the world’s most advantageous human rights system and policies. (Yonhap)
