Recently, the U.S. is getting more frantic in its “human rights” plot against the DPRK.

Typical examples are the bill on extending the validity of the notorious “North Korea Human Rights Act” for five more years proposed by the U.S. Congress in March and in May, and “2021 International Religious Freedom Report” issued by the U.S. State Department on June 2 that slanders the DPRK as a “religious oppression state”.

Such “human rights” plots, the outcome of the U.S. inveterate repugnance towards the DPRK, are, in every way, acts of hostility and political confrontation which have nothing to do with the promotion of genuine human rights.

The U.S. regards the Korean peninsula as the major link in the chain of implementation of its strategy for supremacy in Asia. It is resorting to all-out attempts to isolate and stifle the DPRK, which is winning victory after victory under the uplifted banner of socialism.

However, its military threats and blackmail could no longer work due to our self-defensive war deterrent. When the things have come to this pass, it just picked on our “human rights issue” in dead earnest along the extension line of its isolation and stifling attempt.

The anti-DPRK “human rights strategy” pursued by the U.S. has its roots in its hostile policy towards the DPRK, and it fully serves to overthrow our state and social system.

The U.S., under its anti-DPRK “human rights strategy”, seeks to disgrace and demonize our country by making up a story which goes beyond human imagination. This is the same old trick used by the U.S. even today.

The U.S. seeks to disintegrate us from within and stretch out its tentacles into our internal affairs by seriously distorting the genuine human rights policy of our country and its human rights situation by passing such extraterritorial draconian laws as “North Korea Human Rights Act”. It also takes the lead in seeking international cooperation to put pressure on the DPRK.

This includes the adoption of the “human rights resolution” against the DPRK at the UN. Likewise, the “human rights” campaigns conducted by the U.S. in every part of the world have their ultimate objectives of overthrowing the systems.

It is indeed the worst case of a guilty party filing the suit first that the U.S. tries to do something against us by inventing the nonexistent “human rights issue” in our country.

It is none other than the U.S. which, advocating “almighty power principle” in foreign relations, launched wars and military actions against 40% of the countries in the world since 2001 under the pretext of counter-terrorism, killing more than 800 000 civilians and producing over 38 million refugees. In Afghanistan alone, it killed more than 100 000 civilians and generated more than 10 million refugees in the 20-odd-year-long war, devastating the whole country.

The U.S. is the very country where an average of 40,000 people loses their lives by 400 million private guns every year under the “Statue of Liberty”, the number of which far exceeds its population. In this country, 6 280 or so prisons and detention centers are overflowing with 2 million prisoners, and Native, Asian and African Americans are suffering from discrimination and inequality.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of the innumerable acts of human rights violation perpetrated by the U.S. at home and abroad.

The U.S., a country with the worst human rights record, has no right to admonish others.

Human rights are national sovereignty to us.

Our people have keenly experienced that national sovereignty is more precious than our very lives as they had lived under military occupation of Japanese imperialists for nearly half a century and have been living in blockade with the country being divided and exposed to outside attempts to isolate and stifle us for over 70-year-long period since the country’s liberation in 1945.

Moreover, under the prevailing negative international situation where the crimes of the strong are turned into good deeds and the good deeds of the weak into evil, we feel keenly that human rights without national sovereignty are no more than an empty word and that no compromise nor concession should be made when it comes to the defending of national sovereignty.

We will frustrate every “human rights” plot of the U.S. and safeguard our socialist system to the last where the people have become its masters enjoying genuine human rights.

“Human rights” racket of the U.S. against the DPRK is doomed to failure.

Kim In Guk

Researcher of Korean Association for Human Rights Studies