One of North Korea's most senior diplomats, U.N. envoy Jang Il-hun, warned that if any effort was made to charge the country's leader, Kim Jong-un, with crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, the country would take unspecified "countermeasures." Mr. Jang also denied that the country had political prisoners.

These statements came in a discussion of North Korea's reaction to a U.N. Commission of Inquiry report in February - which included satellite photographs of a network of prison camps and interviews with dissidents who had escaped from them - as well as North Korea's nuclear policies. Mr. Jang insisted that the camps in the satellite photographs were "reformatories" and denied that anyone had been forced into labor.

Mr. Jang was also asked about a nuclear test in 2009 and about the execution of Kim Jong-un's uncle, Jang Song-thaek. Regarding the latter, Mr. Jang said that the uncle had "committed a treason crime" and "illegally amassed foreign currency and broke the law by having dirty and illegal relations with so many women." "He deserved his own execution," he concluded.

SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES