UN Chief calls for probe into human rights conditions in N Korea

The UN human rights commissioner Navi Pillay has called for an international investigation into decades of serious human rights abuses in N Korea.

London: The United Nations human rights commissioner Navi Pillay has called for an international investigation into decades of serious human rights abuses in North Korea. In a rare statement on the country, Pillay said it had ‘one of the worst - but least understood and reported - human rights situations in the world’.

She said that there had been no sign of progress under new leader Kim Jong-un. She also expressed regret that the world`s attention was almost entirely on its nuclear and rocket programmes. In her statement, Pillay said at least 200,000 people were believed to be interned in North Korea’s ‘elaborate network’ of political prison camps, and that survivors of the camps whom she had spoken to ‘described a system that represented the very antithesis of international human rights norms’. She also criticised the use of the death sentences for minor offences, and the uncertainty surrounding the fate of Japanese and South Korean citizens abducted by the North over decades, the report said. According to the report, it is not immediately clear why Pillay had chosen to issue her statement at this time, there have been numerous previous reports containing similar allegations. ANI