A top authority on human rights in North Korea says stringent COVID-19 prevention measures and U.N.-imposed sanctions have exacerbated the country’s already dismal human rights situation, according to a draft statement seen by NK News.

Tomás Ojea Quintana, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, says the sanctions regime should be “reviewed and eased when necessary” for humanitarian purposes, while also calling for a “quantitative assessment” of the impact of sanctions on the well-being of North Korean people.

For its part, the U.N. Panel of Experts (PoE) has each year included a primarily qualitative assessment of