SEOUL: The international community must establish a strategy to provide North Korea with at least 60 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines to prevent humanitarian disaster, an independent UN human rights inspector said on Wednesday.
UN human rights special rapporteur Tomas Ojea Quintana told a briefing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea that vaccines could be a way to persuade the country to ease quarantines that have brought some of its 26 million people to the brink of starvation. Seoul.
“It is imperative that the North Korean population begins to be vaccinated… so that the government has no excuse to continue closing the borders,” he said.
North Korea is not known to import any Covid-19 vaccines, and the Covax global Covid-19 vaccine sharing program has reduced the number of doses allocated for the country.
A South Korean think tank said last year that North Korea, organized under Covax, rejected planned shipments of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine due to concerns about side effects.
Unicef said last year that it also turned down an offer of 3 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine from China’s Sinovac Biotech company in Pyongyang. Ojea Quintana said that authorities in Pyongyang were skeptical of receiving only a partial amount of the vaccine and were then pressured to accept more, which could be resolved by reaching an agreement to provide adequate doses to the entire country.
The UN inspector said that in talks with international diplomats in Seoul, he raised the possibility of supplying 60 million vaccines to North Korea, but such an offer has not yet been formally made to Pyongyang and a number of issues need to be resolved. including payments and any enforcement barriers.
North Korea has not reported any Covid-19 cases and has taken strict anti-virus measures, including closing borders and domestic travel restrictions. For the first time since the beginning of 2020, it began allowing several trains to cross the border from China last month.
“The most serious situation in North Korea is food,” Ojea Quintana said, adding that some of the most vulnerable populations are at risk of starvation.
He said that even if the North Korean government sees a legitimate public health reason for maintaining the restrictions, it has an obligation to balance it with the need for food linked to people’s freedom of movement.
Ojea Quintana added that the border and movement restrictions are particularly damaging for North Koreans who rely on commercial activities along the Chinese border, and this is exacerbated by the impact of the sanctions.