Pyongyang is expected to push for the resumption of South Korean tours to its scenic Mount Kumgang resort.
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“There are a lot of issues to discuss between the South and North. [We] will do our best to resolve them one at a time, step by step”, Hwang said before leaving for Kaesong.
While the talks got underway shortly after 10.30 a.m. (0130GMT), the respective delegates were not expected to find a rapid breakthrough – even last month’s working-level meeting did not close until around midnight.
But any negotiations between the rivals, which are separated by the world’s most heavily armed border, should improve upon the situation in August when they threatened each other with war over landmine explosions that maimed two South Korean soldiers.
Hwang Boo-gi, South Korea’s vice unification minister and the head negotiator, met his North Korean counterpart on Friday at the jointly run industrial park just over the border in the North’s Kaesong city, Yonhap News Agency reported.
While touring a Pyongyang arms factory, Kim said his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, “turned [North Korea] into a powerful nuclear weapons state ready to detonate a self-reliant [atomic] bomb and [hydrogen] bomb to reliably defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation”, according to North Korea’s state-run news outlet KCNA.
AMERICAN OFFICIALS AND experts today poured cold water on leader Kim Jong-Un’s suggestion that North Korea has developed a hydrogen bomb.
However, the senior defence and intelligence officials condemned that there is no evidence of such weapon made by North Korea.
Previous efforts to establish a regular dialogue have tended to falter after an initial meeting -reflecting decades of animosity and mistrust between two countries that have remained technically at war since the end of the 1950-53 Korean conflict.
The industrial zone in Kaesong, founded in 2002, is the last remaining major joint project to result from an earlier period of improved ties. Seoul has also imposed its own punitive sanctions on the North following North Korea’s sinking of a South Korean warship in 2010.
“I am certain the day will come when we will see North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un stand trial at the ICC”, says Ahn Myung Chul, a former prison guard.
“The U.N. Security Council should put Pyongyang on notice that those implicated in crimes against humanity may soon have to face justice”.
Zagaynov said the discussion of irrelevant issues leads to “duplicating functions” of the Security Council thus making its work less efficient.
The agenda for the meeting was adopted by nine votes to four opposed, including China and Russian Federation.
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(CNN)The United Nations Security Council will discuss the human rights situation in North Korea on Thursday, as defectors and victims of torture complain that not enough has been done since the publication of a landmark report in 2014.
