North Korea’s foreign ministry called for the U.N. to abolish its human rights office in Seoul on Tuesday, as the office co-hosted a conference featuring the U.N. special envoy for DPRK human rights.

The statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is attributed to Jang Chol Ho, a researcher at the Korean Association for Human Rights Studies, and accuses the U.N. Human Rights Office (Seoul) of seeking to “[tarnish] the external image of our country at the instigation of the U.S.”

The condemnation aligns with repeated North Korean statements that have rejected all criticism of its well-documentedhuman rights