He said:

Defending human rights is one of the most sensitive and important issues for all countries and nations. Resolutions on ensuring human rights were adopted on the international arena including the UN and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, but human rights abuses and disasters have been reported nonstop in all parts of the world, and confrontation and disputes between nations and civilizations escalated, posing serious threat to global peace and security and the right to existence of mankind.

This taught us the lesson that there could be no human rights apart from sovereignty under the serious human rights situation in different counties whose sovereignty were infringed upon owing to the aggression, interference in internal affairs and unilateral sanctions by the U.S. and other big powers.

The unprecedented political and economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. on the DPRK are human rights crimes tantamount to mass destruction as they deny and obliterate the right to existence of the whole nation.

The DPRK is the socialist state centered on the popular masses and it is guided by the Juche idea which puts forward human being as the most precious existence. The DPRK is the people-first society where all the people enjoy the genuine political, economic and cultural rights.

At a time when the U.S. deployed huge armed forces on the Korean peninsula with the sinister aim to stifle the DPRK by force of arms, the heroic service personnel of the Korean People's Army are conducting a campaign for harnessing the nature to defend the people's happiness in the northern part of the country which suffered from huge natural disaster, true to the call of the Workers' Party of Korea which regards it as the most important revolutionary work to relieve the people of their misfortune.

The U.S. and other hostile forces regarding the hostility toward the DPRK as their state policy are resorting to the vicious economic sanctions and smear "human rights" campaign, finding it impossible to bring down the DPRK by force.

The U.S. checked the introduction of sports apparatuses which have nothing to do with military purposes and refused the remittance to bank for the settlement of accounts of the DPRK's membership fee to the Secretariat of the IPU.

But no sanctions, blockade and fabrication can ever work on the Korean people nor can they tarnish the image of the DPRK invariably advancing along the road for the improvement of genuine human rights.

The DPRK will as ever make contribution to the struggle of progressive mankind for defending global peace, security and human rights, and fulfill its mission and responsibility before the international community.