Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (Human Rights)

I will be reporting appropriately to the House and to the Select Committee. There will be two stages, following this week’s proceedings. Further discussions are being carried on and there will be another two meetings of the council between now and the end of the year. We hope that, by that time, there will be a full programme of work and an agreement on how universal peer reviews will be operated in an effective way, and we hope that the council will be more effective than the organisation that it has replaced. Issues relating to the 21 countries are varied. They claim that they are against the politics of passing condemnatory resolutions in principle. That is why what happened today and, hopefully, what will happen in the subsequent two meetings is so important. That block on doing positive, specific, practical things to deal with countries like North Korea has gone; we can now use the periodic review to put in place effective steps that everybody can co-operate with. The peer review is a review of all countries. No one is excluded from the review. It is not just a review of one or two regimes. Therefore, those 21 countries now have, if they wish to engage positively, a more proactive way of dealing with regimes that are effectively denying their citizens their human rights.