TOKYO, March 18, 2010 (AFP) - France will not open diplomatic relations with North Korea but plans to establish an office there to support non-governmental groups, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Thursday.
    "We are not going to open an embassy, certainly not," Kouchner said at a press conference in Tokyo. "Open an office, yes, in order to help the NGOs (non-governmental organisations) there."
    France is the only European Union country other than Latvia that does not have diplomatic ties with the communist state.
    Paris has argued that the human rights situation in North Korea must improve and has cited concerns over nuclear proliferation.
    In December the French special envoy to Pyongyang, Jack Lang, said France had offered to forge permanent cultural links with North Korea but not full diplomatic ties, hoping to pressure it on the nuclear issue.
    "Our proposal... is to open a permanent structure of cooperation with North Korea -- humanitarian, cultural and linguistic cooperation," Lang told a hearing of members of the French parliament at the time.
    Kouchner, asked to clarify the French position during his Japan visit, said that "we are not rewarding them at all in opening an office" that would support French NGOs working in the isolated country.
    France is not part of six-nation nuclear disarmament talks -- involving North and South Korea, Japan, Russia, the United States and China -- but is one of the five veto-wielding permanent UN Security Council members.
    The North quit the talks last April -- following international criticism for its firing a rocket over Japan in what it claimed was a satellite launch -- and conducted an atomic weapons test in May, its second since 2006.
    Kouchner told his Japanese audience that for them it would be "certainly very difficult to understand (if) we will reopen diplomatic relations, as North Koreans are sending missiles over your country."
    He criticised the Pyongyang regime for developing a weapons programme while its population is suffering desperate poverty.
    "When I consider these very poor conditions and sometimes starving conditions of the people, this is a scandal to develop an atomic bomb in that case," said Kouchner, a co-founder of French NGO Doctors Without Borders.
    Kouchner, who arrived in Japan Thursday, later met his counterpart Katsuya Okada to discuss issues including climate change and non-proliferation, especially the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.
    He was due to meet Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama later Thursday and fly to South Korea on Friday.