UN rapporteur on DPRK to visit S. Korea

The UN special rapporteur on human rights situation in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) will visit South Korea on a fact-finding mission, the foreign ministry here said Thursday. In his second visit since taking office last year, Marzuki Darusman will arrive in Seoul on Sunday for a six-day trip that involves meetings with South Korean officials and collecting information for a report to be submitted to the UN. Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney-general, also seeks to look into humanitarian issues including food shortages in the DPRK and Korean families separated by the civil conflict in the 1950s. The DPRK denies any charges of human rights abuses in the country.