(MENAFN - Trend News Agency ) North Korea's leadership has cracked down further on human rights as tensions have escalated over its nuclear missile tests, including beefing up restrictions on movements and making "horrific" prison conditions more severe, the U.N. rights chief said Monday, reports.

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein told the Security Council that the international security crisis sparked by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's military actions "is inseparable from concerns about the human rights situation of the ordinary people in the country."

A chronic lack of food, partly due to resources which are diverted to the military, has made humanitarian aid provided by the U.N. and others "literally a lifeline for some 13 million acutely vulnerable individuals," he said.

Zeid urged the Security Council to assess the human rights impact of sanctions — including controls over international banking transfers — that have slowed aid deliveries and to minimize the humanitarian consequences.

This was the fourth year the Security Council has discussed human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK, the country's official name. As in previous years, the meeting only went ahead after a procedural vote in the 15-member council where at least nine nations are required to support having the session.

On Monday, the human rights meeting was approved by 10 council members and opposed by Russia and China, with Egypt and Ethiopia abstaining. China's deputy U.N. Ambassador Wu Haitao, whose country is the DPRK's closest ally, said the meeting would be "counterproductive" at a time of heightened tensions.

North Korea's response was, unsurprisingly, angry and swift, reports CBS News' Pamela Falk. A statement that was sent to CBS News from Kim Jong Un's U.N. mission reads in part: "We strongly condemn the meeting as a desperate act of the hostile forces which lost the political and military confrontation with the DPRK that has openly risen to the position of nuclear weapon state," adding that the Council's "despicable plot cannot frighten the DPRK."

The human rights meeting and furious North Korean response come two days after U.N. Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman returned to New York from Pyongyang after meeting with high-level representatives of the government, hoping to restart a dialogue. Feltman said he told the North Koreans of "the urgent need to prevent miscalculations and open channels to reduce the risks of conflict."

North Korea's latest ballistic missile test demonstrated that it can threaten the U.S. mainland, and there is growing concern that the DPRK will soon be able to put a nuclear warhead on its missiles. President Donald Trump has vowed to stop the North Koreans from reaching such capability, increasing the possibility of conflict.

"Indeed, the context of military tensions seems to have deepened the extremely serious human rights violations endured by the DPRK's 25 million people," the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said.

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