Pyongyang, North Korea - North Korea on Saturday lashed out at the UN for accusing Kim Jong-un's regime of widespread human rights violations and called North Korean defectors "human scum."

The furious response came after it was condemned at a UN Security Council meeting on Thursday for spending heavily on its nuclear arms program while its people go hungry.

Ilhyeok Kim, a North Korean defector, told the council that he had been forced at a young age to work in fields without compensation, and that the grain they grew all went to the military.

"The government turns our blood and sweat into a luxurious life for the leadership and missiles that blast our hard work into the sky," he said.

"The money spent on just one missile could feed us for three months."

The meeting was an "insult and infringement" to the spirit of the UN Charter, said an unnamed spokesperson of the Korea Association for Human Rights Studies, in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency.

Pyongyang "strongly denounces and rejects the UNSC for having haggled about the human rights situation in an individual country," the spokesperson said.

"The DPRK people know well about their human rights situation and they make a right appraisal of it by themselves," they added.

The North Korean defectors are "human scum, who fled after abandoning their homeland and parents, wives and children only to save their dirty lives."

The hearing, requested by the US – which spent close to $900 billion on its military in 2022 – was the first in the Security Council on human rights in North Korea in six years, and came as Pyongyang has sped up its testing of nuclear-capable missiles in the past year.