“The secretary-general has always said that he is ready to play any role in order to help enhance dialogue, stability and peace on the Korean Peninsula”, a United Nations spokesman said Sunday night. He was also a member of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the North’s human rights situation that produced a landmark report past year calling for referring Pyongyang to the worldwide Criminal Court.
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North Korea freed and returned a South Korean national on Tuesday who the South’s Unification Ministry said had been arrested by the North in late September as he crossed the river border from China.
The text calls on Pyongyang to “immediately close the political prison camps” that a United Nations commission of inquiry has said are holding up to 100,000 North Koreans in appalling conditions.
The planned trip comes six months after Pyongyang at the last minute canceled an invitation for Ban to visit an inter-Korean factory park in the North Korean city of Kaesong.
Victor Cha, chief Korea analyst at the Center for Strategic and worldwide Studies, and CSIS researcher Lisa Collins made the prediction in the think tank’s “Global Forecast” report, saying the regime of young leader Kim Jong-un is “vulnerable to attacks on its legitimacy”. “As for any future plans by the secretary general to travel to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, we have no further comment at this time”, spokesperson to the Secretary-General Stephane Dujarric said.
A 53-story apartment tower is the new pride of North Korea. Boutros Boutros-Ghali visited in 1993.
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The project involves transporting black coal from Russia’s Khasan to North Korea’s Rajin Port via a 54-kilometer railway and then loading the coal onto cargo ships for delivery to South Korea. Those talks led to a 2005 deal that later fell apart.
