North Korea warned Monday that the United States will face "the toughest counteraction" over its offensive on Pyongyang's dismal human rights record.
  
North Korea also accused the U.S. of using the human rights issue as a lever for bringing down its ideology and social system.
   
"The U.S. will have to experience the toughest counteraction of the (North) against its hostile policy towards the (North)," an unidentified spokesman for the North's Foreign Ministry said in comments carried by the country's official Korean Central News Agency.
  
The warning came just days after the U.S. Congress passed legislation that requires the government to submit a report on North Korea's political prison camps.
   
The U.S. move came as international pressure has been mounting on North Korea to improve its human rights record, with a U.N. General Assembly committee passing a landmark resolution last month that calls for referring the issue to the International Criminal Court.
  
The North's Foreign Ministry spokesman also claimed the U.S. move reneged on a 2005 landmark nuclear deal, saying that the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula will completely lose its meaning at a time when the U.S. is seeking to topple the North.
  
North Korea committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs under the 2005 deal reached with South Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.
  

Still, North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013, drawing international condemnation and U.N. sanctions. The North has recently threatened to push for another nuclear test in protest of a U.N. resolution against its alleged human rights abuse.
   
North Korea has long been labeled as one of the worst human rights violators in the world. But Pyongyang has bristled at such criticism, calling it a U.S.-led attempt to topple its regime. (Yonhap)