UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed his support for the complete denuclearization of North Korea on Friday during a meeting in Seoul with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol.
I would like to reaffirm our clear commitment to the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, North Korea,” Guterres was quoted as saying by the French news agency AFP.
This is a “fundamental objective to bring peace, security and stability to the entire region”he added, according to footage broadcast on South Korean television.
Guterres met Yoon in the South Korean capital as part of his Asian tour, which focuses on promoting nuclear disarmament and international cooperation in areas such as the climate crisis.
Before Seoul, the former Portuguese prime minister was in Japan, where he spoke at the 77th anniversary ceremony of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Guterres repeated his warning against the horrors of atomic weapons in Japan last week at a conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“We are witnessing one that makes the risk of nuclear war once again something that we cannot completely forget about,” Guterres told a news conference in Tokyo on Monday.
In the meeting with Yoon, Guterres stressed the importance of advancing in the denuclearization process to guarantee regional security, peace and stability, according to a spokesman for the Government of Seoul, quoted by the Spanish agency EFE.
He also valued South Korea’s role in contributing to global socioeconomic development and in the fight against climate change, according to the same spokesperson.
Guterres also met with South Korea’s chief diplomat, Park Jin, to discuss security on the Korean peninsula and cooperation on regional and global issues such as climate change, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.
North Korea has carried out a record number of missile tests so far this year.
Seoul and Washington have warned that North Korea could carry out a new nuclear test at any time, which would be the seventh to date and the first since 2017.
The evolution of the Pyongyang regime’s weapons and the “extended deterrence” strategy followed by South Korea and the United States have increased tensions on the peninsula, while disarmament talks have been frozen since 2019.
The two Koreas are still technically at war, since they never signed a peace agreement after the war between 1950 and 1953, although an armistice allowed the fighting to cease and the creation of a demilitarized zone near the 38th parallel, which divides them. countries.
Source: Observadora
