The international community should form a strategy to provide North Korea with at least 60 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines to head off humanitarian disaster, an independent UN human rights investigator has said.

The vaccines could be a way to persuade the country to ease lockdowns that have left some of its 26m people on the verge of starvation, Tomas Ojea Quintana, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, told a briefing in Seoul.

“It is imperative that the population of North Korea start to be vaccinated ... so that the government will have no excuse to maintain the closing of the borders,” he said.

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