hankyoreh

North Korea Thursday offered an angry denial of a U.N. envoy's report on the communist state's human rights situation.

Vitit Muntarborn, a U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea, criticized the country for "appalling" prison conditions and "extensive use of torture and public executions" in his report to a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council here.

"Nowhere in the report exists truth," Kim Yong-ho, a senior official at the North's foreign ministry, said in his speech responding to Muntarborn's statement.

The statement was a product of "the most explicit and extreme political offensives" and "double standards that were rampant" in the past, Kim claimed.

Kim accused the U.N. special envoy of "serving as a mouthpiece for antagonistic forces" who try to overturn North Korea "with human rights as an excuse." He also claimed the "anachronistic" system of "U.N. special rapporteur" must be scrapped.

The United States again on Tuesday designated North Korea as one of the world's worst human rights violators and charged that the country "continued to commit numerous serious abuses."

North Korea appears to have reverted to harsh treatment of people who try to flee the country, the U.S. State Department said in its 2007 Human Rights Report

GENEVA Yonhap