The North Koreans eating tree bark soup beg to differ.

Via WaPo:

When a bombshell United Nations report on North Korean human rights abuses came out in February and concluded that the country was committing human rights violations “without any parallel in the contemporary world,” Pyongyang’s initial reaction was anger.

First, one North Korean spokesperson said that the United States and its allies were running a “human rights racket.” Then, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) published a commentary questioning how a gay man could lead an investigation into human rights. To top it all off, North Korea then published its own investigation into the United States’ human rights violations. It concluded: “The U.S. is a living hell.”

Now, North Korea has decided to take a different tact. This week, North Korea’s Association for Human Rights Studies published a lengthy report that looked at the country’s human rights situation. In a remarkable act of openness, the entire document (53,558 words including appendix) has been published, in English, on the KCNA Web site.

It’s a grueling read. The report opens by explaining the geography and history of Korea. It goes on to try to define the very notion of human rights, while also explaining that state sovereignty is a form of human rights (something the report says Koreans learned while under Japanese rule, living a “miserable life worse than a dog of a family having funeral”). […]

The report argues that North Koreans really do enjoy “genuine human rights,” and lays the blame for international condemnation at the door of the United States, the European Union, Japan and South Korea. A statement that accompanied the release of the report said that North Korean citizens “feel proud of the world’s most advantageous human rights system.”