North Korea on Monday rejected a U.N. resolution condemning gross human rights violations in the communist country amid rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea "totally opposes and rejects" the resolution, "a product of the vicious hostile policy towards it," the North's Foreign Ministry said in English in comments carried by the country's official Korean Central News Agency.

The angry reaction came three days after the U.N. Human Rights Council endorsed the resolution on a vote of 30-6, with 11 abstentions.

The resolution condemns, among other things, "the long-standing and ongoing systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations and other human rights abuses" in the North.

The North's Foreign Ministry claimed the United States and other hostile countries seek to invent an excuse for toppling the North's social system by intensifying "human rights racket" against the North.

North Korea has long been accused of grave human rights abuses ranging from holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in concentration camps to committing torture and carrying out public executions.

The North's latest move came as it threatened to carry out a "new form" of nuclear test in response to a U.N. condemnation of the North's recent ballistic missile launches.

North Korea test-fired two ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast last week, a move Seoul and Washington say violated U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban all ballistic missile tests by the North.

North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013, drawing international condemnation and U.N. sanctions. (Yonhap)