North Korea could face its strongest condemnation to date of its human rights record, with the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee yesterday poised to vote on a draft resolution deploring widespread abuses in the country.
European and Japanese diplomats who drafted the measure say they are hoping to garner more votes than last year in the General Assembly, which has condemned Pyongyang’s rights record every year since 2005 — but to little avail.
This year’s measure, cosponsored by more than 50 countries, condemns “long-standing and ongoing systematic, widespread and gross violations of human rights” in North Korea.
For the second consecutive year, it encourages the UN Security Council to consider referring Pyongyang to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
However, such a move would likely be blocked by Pyongyang’s sole major ally, China, which has veto power in the council.
The draft resolution demands that a vast network of prison camps in North Korea thought to be holding 100,000 inmates living in appalling conditions be shut down.
“At present, bilateral relations between the United Nations and the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] are not good,” North Korean Ambassador-at-large Ri Hung-sik told a news conference in New York earlier this week.
The UN should stop presenting “such unfair measures” as the resolution condemning human rights, he said.
Last year’s resolution was backed by 111 countries, with 19 against, including China and Russia, and 55 abstentions.
Ri dismissed the resolution as “the product of political confrontation and vicious slander” and insisted that his country is ready to address international concerns.
The Third Committee, which focuses on human rights, also criticized Myanmar for its treatment of the nation’s Muslim minority and urged it to change its rules on citizenship to make Rohingya full citizens.
The non-binding draft resolution, co-sponsored by European nations, the US and other Western states, was adopted by consensus during a meeting of the Third Committee. The resolution said the assembly “reiterates its serious concern about the situation of the Rohingya in Rakhine State and of other minorities subject to marginalization and instances of human rights violations and abuses.”
The resolution will be put to another vote at a plenary session of the General Assembly next month.
Meanwhile, at the UN headquarters in Geneva on Wednesday, Chinese officials told a hearing that their country was working hard to root out torture, but experts and activists accused them of dodging tough questions and insisted the practice remained commonplace.
Speaking before the UN Committee Against Torture, a large Chinese delegation insisted that their country had made “tangible, visible and sustained” achievements in stamping out the scourge of torture from the country’s legislation, judiciary and law-enforcement.
Chinese Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Wu Hailong (吳海龍) said his country’s “position against torture is firm,” insisting it was making “enormous efforts” to halt the abuse.
He and other delegation members spent several hours answering a barrage of questions from the 10-member committee on the first day of the hearing in Geneva on Tuesday.
The committee, which periodically reviews the records of all 156 countries that have ratified the Convention Against Torture, raised a broad range of concerns, including allegations that torture is rife in police detention with little or no accountability for the perpetrators.
Li Wensheng (李文勝), the deputy director general of legal affairs at China’s Ministry of Public Security, insisted the country “prohibits torture and prosecutes any personnel or state organs for torture activities.”
“There are plenty of cases prosecuting torture offenders,” he told the committee, pointing for instance to a case of five police officers sentenced to up to two years in prison for extracting confessions under torture.
Committee member Alessio Bruni responded dryly that those penalties seemed “rather mild.”
A report by Amnesty International last week detailed how suspects received electric shocks, were punched, kicked, hit with shoes or bottles filled with water, denied sleep and locked in iron chairs forcing them into painful postures for hours on end.
Officials from Hong Kong were also taken to task over the police crackdown on last year’s pro-democracy protests.
Hong Kong Permanent Secretary for Security Joshua Law Chi-kong (羅智光) insisted to the committee that the police force had shown “a high degree of restraint,” saying that 133 officers had been injured during the 79-day protest.
Hong Kong activist Ken Tsang Kin-chiu (曾健超), who was filmed during the protests being punched and kicked by a group of police officers while in handcuffs, did not agree.
“They are just lying... They are trying to minimize the violence towards the demonstrators,” he told reporters after the hearing.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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