North Korea will no longer attend any UN Human Rights Council sessions focused on the communist country and will ignore decisions of the UN body, Foreign Minister Ri Su-yong says.
The Geneva-based body "has been turned into a mechanism full of politicisation" by hostile Western powers, the chief diplomat of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) said at a session of the Human Rights Council on Tuesday.
North Korea possesses a nuclear deterrent and a strong military, and these "constitute major reasons that drive those ill-minded forces to be hell-bent on a human rights racket against the DPRK," Ri said.
A panel of UN investigators reported in February 2014 that gross human rights violations taking place in North Korea amounted to crimes against humanity. Their report listed evidence of mass imprisonment, killings, torture, rape, and deliberate starvation.
The Human Rights Council reacted by calling on the UN Security Council to consider sanctions and international prosecution of North Korean leaders for crimes against humanity.
Testimonies by defectors from North Korea resulted from "plot-breeding organisations" in Japan, South Korea and the United States who were abducting and paying these defectors to fabricate reports about violations, Ri charged.
There were no human rights violations in his country comparable to the thousands of annual deaths among gun violence victims in the US and among refugees trying to reach to Europe, nor had his country killed millions of civilians like Japan did in World War II, he said.
