North Korea bashes US for human rights 'abuses' like racism, marijuana, and Trump's tweets about CNN
- North Korea fired back at President Donald Trump calling the country "depraved" with a list of its own human rights "abuses" carried out by the US.
- North Korea lists racism, Trump's cabinet containing billionaires, and Trump's mean tweets about CNN as human rights violations.
- North Korea is one of the most repressive regimes on earth, with its government committing appalling atrocities in prison camps around the country.
North Korea responded to President Donald Trump calling the country "depraved" and inhumane with its own compilation of US human rights "abuses" sent out across state media.
The US stands accused by North Korea of "dozens of atrocities" including Trump's presidential cabinet of billionaires, "extreme racism and human hatred" in the US, the use of marijuana, and Trump cracking down on the press by tweeting a gif of himself beating up the network.
North Korea has long mounted propaganda campaigns to discredit the US in response to US condemnations of Pyongyang's own abysmal human rights record. In December, a renowned judge and Auschwitz survivor told the Washington Post that "[North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps."
While North Korea attacked Trump for his rough treatment of the press, Kim Jong Un tightly controls all media within his country and citizens found with outside media can be put to death.
Despite persistent rumors, marijuana is not legal in North Korea, though the plant may grow there indigenously or for industrial uses like hemp fibers.
In 2014, North Korea wrote a 53,558-word report on its human rights record, concluding that it did a pretty good job and that its citizens "feel proud of the world's most advantageous human rights system."
But in the same year, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry issued a report on human rights in North Korea that found systemic, gross human rights violations including murder, slavery, rape and other sexual violence, torture, and other government-backed deeds across the country that amounted to crimes against humanity.
Defector testimonies from North Korea back these claims up.