Washington: The United States on Thursday condemned ‘deplorable’ conditions in North Korea and said serious abuses against stateless Rohingya Muslims threaten Myanmar’s progress on human rights.

The State Department made its assessments in an annual global report on human rights.

The report also criticised a climate of fear and self-censorship in Sri Lanka, where the government has made insufficient progress in accounting for alleged war crimes.

Sri Lanka’s president denounced the report on Friday, comparing the US move over alleged war crimes to a professional boxer taking on a schoolboy.

“There should not have been a resolution at all,” Mahinda Rajapaksa said in his first news conference with the foreign media in Colombo for more than three years. “If they have evidence they should have given [it] to us.”

Pressure has mounted on Rajapaksa’s government ahead of a UN Human Rights Council debate next month, where the US plans to propose a resolution that may call for an international investigation in Sri Lanka.

In a report released this week, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said many thousands of civilians were killed, injured or remain missing after the 26-year civil conflict between government forces and separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the north of the island that ended in May 2009.

The report, however, was mostly strongly critical of China, where it said authorities continued to tighten restrictions on basic freedoms.

It noted a continuing crackdown on rights activists and freedom of expression, and increased repression against ethnic Tibetans and Uighur Muslims in the country’s far west.

At the launch of the report, that assesses conditions in almost 200 countries and territories during 2013, US Secretary of State John Kerry offered a stinging rebuke of North Korea.

He cited a UN commission of inquiry that found “clear and compelling evidence of wholesale torture and crimes against humanity.”

He voiced disgust over summary executions reported by the commission in which victims were fired at by artillery and anti-aircraft weapons “that literally obliterate human beings”.

North Korea has rejected the UN report, claiming it is a US-orchestrated effort to bring down its socialist system.

The US report found that in Myanmar, significant human rights problems persist throughout the country.

Military and security forces continued to act with impunity, and the government did little during the year to address the root causes of the violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine State.

A chemical weapons attack in Syria last summer that the US says killed more than 1,400 people was the world’s worst human rights violation of 2013, the Obama administration concluded Thursday.

It said the August 21 chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburbs in Syria was “one of many horrors in a civil war filled with countless crimes against humanity,” including the torture and murder of prisoners, and the targeting of civilians with barrel bombs and Scud missiles.

More than 100,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war.