President Donald Trump said Friday he plans to address human rights when he meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the upcoming Singapore summit.
“We’ll bring it up,” the President told reporters before departing for the G7 Summit.
North Korea has perpetuated human rights abuses for decades, according to watchdog agencies, human rights groups and the US government. A 2014 report from a United Nations Human Rights Council commission found the authoritarian regime had committed “systemic, widespread and gross human rights violations” including “arbitrary detention, torture, executions and enforced disappearance to political prison camps, violations of the freedoms of thought, expression and religion, (and) discrimination on the basis of State-assigned social class, gender, and disability.”
The UN commission concluded that crimes against humanity had been committed by North Korean officials.
“These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation,” the report read.
It noted that these crimes were ongoing “because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place.”
Trump did not address North Korea’s human rights offenses during his lengthy Oval Office meeting with Kim Yong Chol, a top aide to the North Korean leader, in early June.
“We did not talk about human rights, no,” Trump said when asked by reporters at the time but noted he would “probably” discuss them with Kim Jong Un, “maybe in great detail.”
CNN’s Kaitlin Collins and Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report.
