South Korea shuns UN vote

2003-04-16 12:44

Seoul - South Korea's government said on Wednesday it would abstain from a sensitive UN vote condemning North Korea's human rights record to avoid offending Pyongyang at a sensitive stage of nuclear diplomacy.

The 53-member United Nations Human Rights Commission is to vote on a US-backed European Union resolution condemning North Korea for its human rights abuses in Geneva later on Wednesday.

North Korea stands charged of running a system of camps for political prison where forced labor and torture are rampant. Its population suffers from chronic hunger and malnutrition and hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing the country.

"We decided to abstain from the UN voting on North Korea today," South Korean foreign ministry spokesperson Kim Sun-Heung said.

The stand sparked angry protest from the opposition and human rights activists here.

The spokesperson said the decision was in line with Seoul's efforts to avoid angering North Korea, which might derail efforts to end the six-month-long crisis over its nuclear ambitions.

"At a time of seeking to urgently address the nuclear issue, we have concerns that it may be undesirable to publicly provoke North Korea," Kim said.

"The UN resolution could not help ease the situation if North Korea overreacts to it. Pyongyang could take it as an insult to its sovereignty."

Hopes for a peaceful end to the nuclear stand-off have mounted since Pyongyang signaled last week it could engage in US-proposed multilateral talks. Diplomats from the United States, China and North Korea are to meet next week in Beijing for the talks, a senior US official said on Tuesday.

South Korea's opposition Grand National Party, which controls parliament, and human rights activists blasted the government's decision.

"The abstention is such an unjust decision, a wrong step that indicates the government has given up its identity as a human rights advocate," the GNP said in a statement.

"It is deplorable that the (South Korea) government sits idle on human rights conditions on North Koreans," Citizens United for Better Society, a Seoul-based conservative civic group, said in a statement.

South Korea's ex-UN ambassador Park Soo-Gil. a professor at Seoul National University, said it was "surprising" for Seoul to abstain from the vote, the first time the UN body has deliberated on a resolution to condemn North Korea. "It is totally unthinkable," he said.

Coinciding with the UN vote, lawmakers from the United States, Japan, Britain, Mongolia and South Korea gathered in Seoul on Wednesday for a human rights forum to inaugurate a joint body to help North Korean refugees.

"We all fear that North Korean lives there are very precarious," Ed Royce, a US Republican lawmaker, told the seminar, referring to up to 400 000 North Korean refugees fleeing from their homeland.

The newly-launched International Parliamentarians' Coalition for North Korean Refugees and Human Rights called for the setting up of refugee camps for the North Koreans in China and urged Beijing to stop repatriating them.

- AFX