He entered and left the North Korean court in handcuffs on Wednesday, flanked by two public security officers in uniform.
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State prosecutors sought the death penalty, but Mr Lim’s lawyer asked the court to take into account the fact that his client was a fellow Korean and that he had frankly confessed to everything the prosecution had brought up.
Lim pleaded to be given a chance, and said if the court gave him one, he would not do anything bad again.
In Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadian officials would continue to press for access to Lim.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that the North said the latest inter-Korean talks were no better than not holding the meeting at all and that the prospects for inter-Korean ties are gloomier than before.
According to his church in Toronto, he was on a purely humanitarian mission and had visited the North on numerous occasions to support work with orphanages and nursing homes.
Lim has made many humanitarian visits to North Korea for two decades.
Canada is dismayed at the unusually harsh sentence imposed on a Canadian pastor detained by North Korea, particularly given “his age and fragile health”, the foreign affairs department said in a statement on Wednesday.
“The supreme court announced that Lim was guilty of joining the United States and South Korea in anti-DPRK human rights “racket” and fabricating and circulating false propaganda materials tarnishing the country’s image”, Xinhua said.
“The capitulation on that issue at the previous press conference in the DPRK, therefore, was curious”, church spokeswoman Lisa Pak said in an email.
The Canadian government also declined to comment. The pair are among three South Koreans known to be held by the North.
Tina Park, a PhD candidate who studies the history of Korean-Canadian relations at the University of Toronto, attended the downtown branch of Lim’s church for a time, and said his detention was a shock to many in the Korean Canadian community. He appeared on North Korean state media earlier this year confessing to crimes against the state. “He is very well known…his goal was always philanthropy”.
The spokesman also urged “the conclusion of the peace treaty with the USA in order to put an end to the hostile policy”, which he said was “the root cause of all problems”. “This is a case that deserves an active Canadian engagement”.
Although religious freedom is enshrined in the North’s constitution, it does not exist in practice and religious activities are restricted to officially recognised groups linked to the government.
Both Waldheim and Boutros-Ghali met with North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il-sung, during their visits to Pyongyang.
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In 2014, an American Baptist named Jeffrey E. Fowle was detained for six months for an anti-state crime: leaving a Bible in a public washroom.
