State-owned North Korean press agency KCNA slammed additional sanctions filed by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), calling the move a \u00ab\u00a0hostile policy\u00a0\u00bb and the \u00ab\u00a0last-ditch efforts\u00a0\u00bb of an administration \u00ab\u00a0whose days are numbered. \u00a0\u00bb
It said the sanctions were being enacted alongside the State Department’s \u00ab\u00a0Report on Serious Human Rights Abuses or Censorship in North Korea,\u00a0\u00bb released in 2016.
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In a typically verbose opinion piece, KCNA said, \u00ab\u00a0The US is not qualified to talk about somebody’s ‘human rights’ as it is the world’s worst human rights abuser and a tundra of human rights.
\u00ab\u00a0Obama would be well advised not to waste time taking issue with others’ ‘human rights issue(s)’ but make good arrangements for packing in the White House.
\u00ab\u00a0He had better repent of the pain and misfortune he has brought to so many Americans and other people of the world by creating the worst human rights situation in the US during his tenure of office. \u00a0\u00bb
The Obama administration could not immediately be reached for comment.
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Documented abuse
The State Department report is one of several recent institutional investigations documenting North Korea’s human rights record.
In November, the Washington-based Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) released satellite images that show the reclusive nation’s prison camp system, where detainees are subjected to forced labor, torture, starvation, rape and death, may be expanding. The images are of Camp No. 25, a camp near Chongjin, on North Korea’s northeast coast.
Up to 120,000 men, women and children are imprisoned in the gulags, known as \u00ab\u00a0kwanliso\u00a0\u00bb in Korean, according to the United Nations .
A 2014 report from the international organization estimated that \u00ab\u00a0hundreds of thousands of political prisoners\u00a0\u00bb have died in the North Korean gulags over the past 50 years amid \u00ab\u00a0unspeakable atrocities. \u00a0\u00bb
The scale of North’s camp system
\u00ab\u00a0The inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights,\u00a0\u00bb the report said, drawing a parallel between the camps and those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
\u00ab\u00a0These camps constitute the cornerstone of the country’s large infrastructure dedicated to political repression and social control that enables widespread and systematic human rights abuses,\u00a0\u00bb rights group Amnesty International said in a statement.
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