A/HRC/25/CRP.1 Rights Council, in particular, identified the need for an international independent and impartial inquiry mechanism with adequate resources to investigate and more fully document the grave, systematic and widespread violations of human rights in the DPRK. 8. In January 2013, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called for a fully-fledged international inquiry into serious crimes that, she said, had been taking place in the DPRK for decades, and stressed that the concern about the DPRK’s possession of nuclear weapons should not overshadow the deplorable human rights situation in North Korea. 9. The establishment of the Commission of Inquiry must also be seen in light of the DPRK’s limited cooperation with the existing human rights mechanisms. The DPRK is a State Party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights (ICESCR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Since 2009, the DPRK has not submitted any state reports on the foregoing treaties, although in 2004, the DPRK did take the positive step of inviting a delegation of the Committee on the Rights of the Child to visit the country. 10. The DPRK underwent its first cycle of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in 2009 and will be subject to the second cycle in 2014. While stating some generic commitments to human rights obligations, the DPRK failed to accept any of the 167 recommendations made by the UPR Working Group in 2009.3 11. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has not had access to the country since the inception of the mandate in 2004. The DPRK has rejected the mandate, deeming it as a hostile act, and refuses to cooperate with it. Since the mission of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in 1995,4 not a single mandate holder of the Human Rights Council has been invited, or permitted, to visit the DPRK. 12. On the basis of resolutions by the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, the Secretary-General and the High Commissioner for Human Rights have also issued periodic reports detailing human rights violations and related impunity in the DPRK. The DPRK has not provided substantive input to these reports since it has rejected the underlying resolutions of the General Assembly and Human Rights Council. Since 2003, the DPRK Government has also rejected all offers of technical assistance from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). B. Interpretation of the mandate 13. The mandate of the Commission of Inquiry is essentially found in paragraph 5 of Resolution 22/13 that makes specific reference to paragraph 31 of the 2013 report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.5 Reading the two paragraphs together, the Commission determined that it had been mandated to investigate the systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights in the DPRK including, in particular, the following nine specific substantive areas: - violations of the right to food, 3 4 5 6 A/HRC/13/13 E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1 A/HRC/22/57.