North Korea Slams UN’s ‘Suicidal’ Sanctions, Calls For Talks With US While UN Begins Probe Into Human Rights Violations

North Korea called the latest sanctions imposed against it by the United Nations Security Council as “anachronistic and suicidal,” and said that the U.S. and “hostile forces” are trying to stifle the Kim Jong Un regime. The comments, made by a spokesman for the North’s powerful National Defense Commission (NDC), come as a response to the U.N. sanctions over Pyongyang’s nuclear test in January and a rocket launch in February.

The statement from the NDC, cited by North Korea’s KCNA, said that the sanctions imposed against the reclusive country have just made its will to continue self-reliance stronger. North Korea also reiterated its threat to open a “retaliatory nuclear strike” against the U.S. at any moment due to its aggression on the Korean peninsula.

“Those, who blindly yielded to the brigandish demands of the U.S. which lorded it over our planet through high-handed and arbitrary practices, domination and hegemony and backed it in its hostile moves against the DPRK veiled with ‘UN resolution,’ made a mess of their precious legacy and tradition for which nothing can compensate,” the statement said. “The NDC of the DPRK would like to tell the whole world what consequences the U.S. and its followers' reckless hostile moves against the DPRK have brought to this land through a fierce uncompromising confrontation between independence and subjugation, justice and injustice and progress and reactionary.”

The spokesman for the NDC also called for the U.S. to make efforts in order to bring peace in the Korean peninsula through talks instead of sanctions, according to Yonhap. The call for talks follows Pyongyang’s announcement last month that it plans to conduct nuclear warhead and ballistic missile tests soon, a move suspected to be in defiance of the tougher U.N. sanctions.

Meanwhile, a U.N. office probing the human rights violations by North Korea has been conducting interviews with North Korean defectors to gather more information on the violations in the country. U.N.’s field office was opened in Seoul last year, a move that was criticized by Pyongyang, after the United Nations Commission on Human Rights released a report, slamming North Korea over its violations of human rights.

“Since February, the government has cooperated with the U.N. office by allowing it to hold interviews with North Korean defectors,” Jeong Joon-hee, a spokesman at Seoul's unification ministry reportedly said, in a news briefing.

The investigation comes amid allegations that North Korea keeps hundreds of thousands of people in political camps and keeps a strict control over the information that comes into the country. On Friday, reports said that the country has blocked access to the social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and South Korean websites.

In December, the U.N.’s General assembly adopted a resolution, for the second consecutive time, calling to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court due to human rights violations.

Last month, a new law aiming to improve the treatment of North Koreans was passed, after being stuck for years due to the disagreements between conservatives and liberals, Yonhap reported. According to the law, Seoul is trying to form a center that will investigate the human rights violations in North Korea and collate the needed data to create archives on the issue.