North Korea on Friday slammed the G7 on its recent statement criticising Pyongyang, calling it “full of extremely interventionist and improper contents.”
North Korea’s Criticism
North Korea’s state-controlled media outlet Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted the country’s foreign minister (FM), Choe Son Hui, as saying that the G7 does not have the “authority nor qualification” to prevent Pyongyang from exercising its “sovereignty and its national status.”
The FM added that the North’s test launches aimed to “bolster up its military capabilities for self-defence… to deter threat from the unstable security environment” created by the “reckless and provocative military manoeuvres” of the US and its allies. She reiterated that Pyongyang will continue to take action “based on all legal rights granted to a sovereign state” until the “hostile” military threat posed by the US “is completely removed.”
The official further rebuked the G7’s call to halt missile tests, calling it “the most absurd and illegal interference in the internal affairs of the DPRK to force it into flouting its sacred state law.” North Korea’s position as a nuclear weapons state “will remain as an undeniable and stark reality — no matter that the US and the West would not recognise it for a hundred or a thousand years,” Choe said.
It is “anachronistic to think that the right to and capability for nuclear strike is exclusive to Washington,” she added
The minister concluded by calling the G7 “a closed group of a handful of egoistic countries,” which “does not represent the just international community but serves as a political tool for ensuring the US hegemony.”
The #G7 condemned #NorthKorea’s recent #ICBM launch, saying the rogue regime will “never” gain the status of a nuclear state. Read more:https://t.co/uNA0Lz09rk#NPT #KoreanPeninsula #KimJongUn #Pyongyang #Korea #SouthKorea #Japan #DPRK #Seoul pic.twitter.com/B1XOCGE5nq
— Statecraft (@statecraftdaily) November 21, 2022
G7’s Comments on North Korea
In its statement on Tuesday, the G7 had strongly condemned the North’s “unprecedented number of unlawful ballistic missile launches,” including its solid-fuel ICBM test this month.
It accused Pyongyang of creating an “increasingly escalatory and destabilising rhetoric regarding the use of nuclear weapons,” which undermines regional stability and poses a grave threat to international security.
Additionally, the group called on the country to refrain from any further nuclear tests or launches that use ballistic missile technology, warning that such actions will be “met with a swift, united, and robust international response.”
The grouping also reiterated its goal of North Korea’s “complete, verifiable, and irreversible abandonment of its nuclear weapons and any other weapons of mass destruction.” “North Korea cannot and will never have the status of a nuclear-weapon State under the NPT,” the statement stressed, calling on the rouge regime to “accept repeated offers of dialogue,” including from Japan, the US, and South Korea.
Moreover, the G7 deplored North Korea’s systematic human rights violations and urged it to “facilitate access for international humanitarian organisations and resolve the abductions issue immediately.”