Human rights group to deliver letter to North Korean embassy "Implement U.N. recommendation"

Human rights groups delivered a statement to the North Korean embassy on the 5th local time, two days before the UN member states' human rights deliberation day in North Korea.

Ten human rights organizations, including the U.N. Center for Human Rights Policy, issued a statement at the North Korean mission in Geneva, Switzerland, and put letters, statements, and reports on human rights conditions in the mail box of the North Korean mission.

"Ten years have passed since the publication of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry's report on North Korean human rights, North Koreans still suffer various human rights violations in the fields of basic survival and civil and political rights, as well as economic, social and cultural rights," the groups said in a statement.

"Every year, the U.N. General Assembly calls for immediate action to ensure the basic human rights and survival of North Koreans, but North Korea is not responding to the U.N.'s recommendations," he said, urging North Korea to comply with international agreements and submit an implementation report.

The groups also include calls for disclosing whereabouts and allowing interviews of South Korean missionaries detained in North Korea, resolving the issue of abductees, detainees, South Korean prisoners of war, and displaced families, suspending torture in detention facilities for forced repatriators, guaranteeing freedom of relocation for all North Koreans, and abolishing evil laws, including the Rebel Thought and Culture Act.

These groups are the organizations that submitted reports on North Korean human rights issues ahead of the UN's "universal human rights regular review" of North Korea and the UPR, which will be held at the UN Geneva office on the 7th.

UPR is a system in which 193 UN member states take turns to deliberate on their human rights situation and whether their recommendations are implemented, and this is the fourth UPR in about five years since 2019.