Anchor: Pyongyang has again threatened to retaliate against Seoul in the event it houses a United Nations field mission to investigate human rights violations in the North. Pyongyang's state-run daily Rodong Sinmun reminded Seoul and the international community of the regime's previous threat that the envisioned UN office will become the priority target of so-called "merciless punishment."
Our Kim Bum-soo has more.
 
Report: North Korea has again criticized the United Nations’ plan to establish a field office in Seoul as a regional base to investigate the human rights situation in North Korea.
 
The Rodong Sinmun, the daily newspaper of the North's ruling Workers' Party, said Thursday that South Korea's participation in the adoption of a UN resolution on North Korean human rights is an unacceptable provocation against its regime.
 
The state media also argued that Seoul is denying the North Korean system by seeking to house the field mission of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
 
The North Korean newspaper then reminded South Korea and the international community of its previous threats that it will pursue "merciless punishment" as soon as the office opens. The warning is a reiteration of the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, which said earlier this week that the UN office is its "highest priority target." The newspaper said that the warning will not end as empty rhetoric.
 
Following Pyongyang's initial threat, South Korea's permanent representative to Geneva, Ambassador Choi Seok-young told reporters that the field office is part of the United Nations and that the warnings cannot be realized. He stressed that the Seoul office will open before the end of June after South Korea and the UN OHCHR sign an agreement. 
 
Last year, the UN human rights agency selected South Korea as the location to build its outpost to investigate North Korea’s human rights abuses. The local base is expected to interview North Korean defectors in the South to prove human rights violations in the North.
 
The plan is in line with the UN's latest efforts to improve the destitute human rights situations in the North. Last year, the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Human Rights in North Korea said that the communist state committed human rights violations "without parallel in the contemporary world” and recommended that the North’s human rights violations be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The commission’s findings served as the basis of a new UN resolution on the North’s human rights issue that was passed at the UN General Assembly.
Kim Bum-soo, KBS World Radio News.