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N. Korea talks sidelining human rights: UN rapporteur
SEOUL, July 9, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – The North Korean talks process with the US
and the South is sidelining the human rights of Pyongyang’s oppressed
citizens, the UN’s top official on the issue said Monday.
In a whirlwind of diplomacy, the leader of the isolated, nuclear-armed
North Kim Jong Un held an unprecedented summit with US President Donald Trump
in Singapore last month, after two earlier meetings with the South’s Moon
Jae-in.
It is a marked contrast to the mutual threats and mounting fears of last
year, instead raising hopes of reaching a deal over North Korea’s arsenal,
which include nuclear bombs and missiles capable of reaching the US mainland.
But Pyongyang remains accused by many — including the UN — of a litany of
rights abuses against its population.
Neither the joint statement issued by Trump and Kim in Singapore, nor the
earlier Panmunjom Declaration signed by Kim and Moon, mentioned the issue of
human rights.
“It seems that those who are negotiating are losing sight of this important
thing, which is would this process benefit at the end the people living in
North Korea,” said Tomas Ojea Quintana, the United Nations’ Special
Rapporteur on human rights in the North.
Instead Washington and Seoul were prioritising their own concerns, he said.
“In principle the interests that the president of the United States has
shown is that they want to denuclearise North Korea so their territory is not
in danger, and that of course is something that has to do with their own
interests,” Ojea Quintana told AFP in Seoul.
“I’m still trying to understand to what extent human rights was raised” by
Trump in Singapore, the Argentinian lawyer added.
“It seems that it was not comprehensively addressed.”
In the Singapore statement, Kim signed up to a vague commitment to work
towards “complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”, but Pyongyang
has long seen that as a lengthy process of undefined multilateral
disarmament, rather than a unilateral dismantling of its own weapons.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Pyongyang at the weekend to try to
flesh out the process, only for the North to warn that it was being
jeopardised by overbearing “gangster-like” US demands.
Pompeo shrugged off the accusations, insisting the talks were being
conducted in “good faith” and making progress, and adding sanctions would
only be lifted with “final” denuclearisation.
BSS/AFP/MRI/1604 hrs