21 November 2009 / REUTERS/AP, UNITED NATIONS
A special committee of the UN General Assembly condemned North Korea and Myanmar on Thursday for what it said were widespread human rights violations in the two Asian countries.
The 192-nation General Assembly’s Third Committee, which focuses on human rights issues, approved a non-binding resolution on North Korea 97-19 with 65 abstentions. A similar resolution on Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, passed 92-26 with 65 abstentions. The North Korea resolution voiced “very serious concern” at what it said were persistent reports of “systematic, widespread and grave violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.” Among Pyongyang’s violations, the resolution said, are torture, inhuman conditions of detention, public executions, collective punishment and “the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor.” North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador, Pak Tok Hun, dismissed the resolution as a political attack by its enemies. “The draft resolution is nothing more than a document of political conspiracy of the hostile forces to ... deny and obliterate the state and social system of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” he told the committee.
