(Reuters)
Despite actively pursuing diplomacy on its nuclear program, North Korea continues to quash basic freedoms, maintaining political prison camps and strict surveillance of its citizens, a United Nations human rights investigator said on Friday.
"With the positive developments in the past year 2018, it is all the more regrettable that the serious human rights situation on the ground in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea remains unchanged," Tomas Ojea Quintana, U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the DPRK, said in his latest report.
North Korea has frozen its nuclear and missile testing since 2017 and held several summits with the United States and South Korea in the past year, emerging from decades of isolation.
Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump held a second meeting last week, but their talks in Vietnam broke up with no agreement. Trump said on Friday he would be disappointed if North Korea were to resume weapons testing and reiterated his belief in his good relationship with Kim. Ojea Quintana said that he hoped the summit's abrupt end "doesn't compromise the peaceful environment for dialogue that all the parties have been working for during 2018".
The U.N. expert said he "continues to receive reports of the existence of the political prison camps where people are being sent without due process. Torture and ill-treatment reportedly remain widespread and systematic in detention facilities." Surveillance and close monitoring of all citizens, and other severe restrictions such as on freedom of movement remain intact, Ojea Quintana said, adding the penal system denies due process and a guarantee of fair trial. Read more
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