North Korea To Publish Human Rights Report To Refute 'Lies And Fabrications'

North Korea’s Association For Human Rights Studies said that it would release its own human rights report in an attempt to counter the “lies and fabrications” spread by “hostile forces,” Agence France-Presse, or AFP, reported Monday.

“The report will show the true picture of the people (of North Korea) dynamically advancing towards a brighter and rosy future while enjoying a free and happy life under the socialist system centered on the popular masses," a spokesperson for the Association For Human Rights Studies reportedly said in an interview to the North’s official KCNA news agency, adding that the report will help the world “do away with their prejudice and misunderstanding" about the human rights situation in the isolated country.

The United Nations Human Rights Council, or UNHRC, in a report published in February, had raised serious concerns over widespread human rights abuses in North Korea and suggested an immediate investigation by the International Criminal Court. North Korea, which has been under the rule of the Kim dynasty for over six decades, has one of the worst human rights records in the world.

“The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world... these crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation,” the U.N. report had said.

UNHRC also said that there was an “almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” in North Korea, and that it displayed “many attributes of a totalitarian State.”

North Korea had, at the time, rejected the findings of the report and reportedly called it an attempt to “defame the dignified image of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and eventually eliminate its social system."

While the Association For Human Rights Studies did not specify a date for the release of the report, the spokesperson said that it would be published in the “near future,” AFP reported.