North Korea's ongoing human rights violations were slammed and shamed by most members of the UN Security Council in a meeting last week. In a powerful briefing by both diplomats and a high profile North Korean political defector, the 15-member council underscored the noxious relationship between the regime's massive military buildups at the expense of both its population's human rights and physical well being -- namely access to sufficient food and nutrition.
Gumhyok Kim, while a North Korean student in China in 2011, became increasingly disillusioned about his country's communist regime. Though a privileged student studying abroad, he told the UN Security Council that: "I realised that the Kim family that I had wanted to serve were not my heroes, but dictators denying countless people's freedom just to build their own power."
After he and a group of like-minded dissident students were discovered, he decided to escape to South Korea for freedom. The others in his group never made it.
"If they developed the economy instead of missiles, there would be no need for any North Koreans to starve to death," he told delegates, pointing out that "if North Korea were a normal state, it would contribute to world peace rather than threatening it."
Gumhyok Kim implored the international community to: "Please stand on the side of the North Korean people, not the dictatorship."
Political repression, control of people's movements and a suffocating surveillance state remain the cornerstones of the Pyongyang regime, under Kim Jong-un's leadership.
Volker Turk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, addressed the "unmitigated suffering" in this East Asian country.
"Today the DPRK is a country sealed off from the world. A stifling claustrophobic environment, where life is a daily struggle devoid of hope," he stressed, referring to the country's official name the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Mr Turk described the DPRK -- as a "landscape of misery, repression, fear, hunger and hopelessness", which is "profoundly alarming".
South Korea, the president of the Security Council for the June session, put forth a number of social political initiatives; The political trails and tribulations of their fellow Koreans in North Korea, was a key human rights theme.
China and Russia opposed discussing human rights in the council meeting, calling for a vote to block these proceedings. However, their motion was defeated by the other members. Nonetheless the blocking moves by Moscow and Beijing all but assured that any formal council resolution, or even a watered-down presidential statement, would be vetoed.
South Korea's ambassador Joonkook Hwang warned, "the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's obsessive pursuit of nuclear weapons and its Orwellian control of its people have one single root cause: the survival of its peculiar regime, regardless of the cost".
He went on to say that the country is run by "a bizarre family cult dynasty".
Ambassador Hwang added, "North Korea is like a two-headed chariot driven by nuclear weapons and human rights violations. If human rights violations stop, nuclear weapons development will also stop."
North Korea's nexus of political repression, weapons proliferation and threats to international peace and security was well stated by US UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield who said, "This repression and totalitarianism, proliferation and gamesmanship, makes each and every one of us less safe."
She added, "The efforts by both Russia and China to block this meeting today is another effort to support the DPRK, and is also emboldening their actions."
Japan's delegate, Yamazaki Kazuyuki, asserted, "The intertwining of human rights violations with international peace and security cannot be more obvious in the case of North Korea."
He said that food security for the North Korean population remains dire and noted that nearly half its population, a staggering 12 million people, is under-nourished.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to visit Pyongyang to reinforce the political and military relationship with the isolated North Korea. Russia has tried to rekindle the once close strategic ties between the two rogue regimes. North Korea sends conventional artillery munitions and missiles to support Russia's war in Ukraine.
But it's the provocative and witheringly expensive nuclear and ballistic missile programme which has put North Korea's pampered military ahead of its downtrodden population. The North Korean regime has long stressed neutrons for military development over nutrition for its own people. Not much seems to be changing.
John J Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defence issues.