A North Korean foreign ministry official stressed that the country’s COVID-19 prevention measures do not violate its people’s human rights, slamming claims of abuses in a recent U.N. Secretary-General’s report.

In a strongly worded statement issued Wednesday, Director-General Jo Chol Su of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Department of International Organizations argued that the country’s lockdown measures are on par with those in other countries.

“I cannot understand at all why only our anti-epidemic measures should be singled out as ‘human rights abuses’ out of the general anti-epidemic measures taken by all countries,” Jo wrote. “Measures taken to