The DPRK government regards it as the supreme principle of state activities to protect and promote human rights and improve the people's well-being, he noted, and continued:

Human rights are firmly guaranteed legally and substantially as inviolable sacred rights and everyone fully enjoys human rights and basic freedom related to his or her dignity.

He called for properly settling the human rights abuses committed in the past.

In recent years some countries have taken positive steps to make an apology and reparation for the human rights abuses committed by them in other countries during their colonial rules.

However, Japan has so far evaded its governmental responsibility for such hideous crimes against humanity committed during its past military occupation of Korea as the massacre of more than one million Koreans, conscription of at least 8.4 million Koreans and the act of forcing more than 200,000 Korean women into sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army and refused to make an apology and reparation to the victims and made no scruple of distorting the crime-woven history though a century has passed since then.

Proceeding from this viewpoint, the Japanese authorities have perpetrated all sorts of discriminations and human rights abuses against Korean residents in Japan.

Japan would be well advised to behave with discretion, mindful that its future depends on making a sincere apology and reparation for its past crimes.