Vol. 79/No. 2      January 26, 2015

Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., argued that the North Korean government should be brought up on charges before the International Criminal Court. She demanded that North Korea relinquish its national sovereignty and permit “unfettered access” to U.N. “observers.”

A Dec. 24 statement by the Permanent Mission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the United Nations noted that the U.S. government and its allies are themselves major violators of human rights, practicing “racial discrimination, maltreatment of indigenous peoples and refugees and tortures.” The statement called attention to recent revelations of “atrocities of CIA torture committed by the United States.”

The North Korean statement rejected the Security Council’s “double standard,” ignoring human rights violations by Washington and only discussing human rights in countries that face U.S. hostility.

Both the Chinese and Russian governments opposed the Security Council discussing the charges; the governments of Chad and Nigeria abstained. China’s representative, Liu Jieyi, said the Security Council “was not the appropriate forum” for “politicization of human rights issues.” Russian Federation representative Evgeniy Zagaynov said that the council’s discussions would be an obstacle to “dialogue with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

The government of North Korea has refused to allow representatives of the U.N. Human Rights commission to visit the country, stating that the inquiry was a “product of political confrontation and conspiracy.”

The U.N. General Assembly Nov. 18 approved the findings of the Human Rights Council, which accused North Korea of possible “crimes against humanity” in its February 2014 report. The Cuban government spoke against the resolution.

The assembly voted down the Cuban representative’s proposal to amend the U.N. resolution to call for “a new cooperative approach to the consideration of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” and “the establishment of dialogues” and cooperation between U.N. bodies and the North Korean government.

Over the last several years, at Washington’s urging, the Security Council — with the votes of the Russian and Chinese governments — has tightened sanctions on North Korea, including placing travel bans on many officials, freezing assets, banning exports of weapons and calling for inspecting North Korean ships on the high seas.

Washington’s pushing of accusations of human rights violations against North Korea are especially hypocritical, given the U.S. government’s more than 60-year history of intervention and aggression in the Korean Peninsula, from the U.S. occupation and forced division of the country into North and South — with the agreement of Moscow — to U.S. backing of successive military dictatorships in the South that jailed or killed tens of thousands of workers and peasants, and continuing U.S. economic sanctions against Pyongyang, designed to starve the North into submission.  
 
 
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