A UN panel, led by retired Australian judge Michael Kirby, says crimes against humanity have been committed in North Korea and it will call for an international criminal investigation.
Its report, to be released on Monday, is the most authoritative account yet of rights violations by North Korean authorities and is bound to infuriate the country's unpredictable leader.
The commission, which conducted a yearlong investigation, has found evidence of an array of crimes, including extermination, crimes against humanity against starving populations and a widespread campaign of abductions of individuals in South Korea and Japan.
Last October, Kirby told the General Assembly that when the commission delivers its final report, "the international community will be obliged to face its responsibilities and decide what concrete action it will take" to protect the North Korean people.
But justice over the crimes is a distant prospect, not least as North Korea's ally, China, is likely to block any referral to the International Criminal Court.
The report does not examine in detail individual responsibility for crimes but recommends steps towards accountability.
It could also build international pressure on North Korea, whose parlous rights record has drawn less censure at the UN than its nuclear and missile programs.
North Korea's hereditary regime has shrugged off years of continuous outside pressure, including tough UN and US sanctions directed at its weapons programs.
The report concludes that the testimony and other information it received, "create reasonable grounds ... to merit a criminal investigation by a competent national or international organ of justice."
David Hawk, a former UN human rights official and a leading researcher on North Korean prison camps, said legal scholars, human rights lawyers and nongovernment groups have previously concluded crimes against humanity have been committed.
But this is the first time experts authorised by UN member states have made that determination. Hawk testified before the commission but has not seen its report.
The commission conducted public hearings with more than 80 victims and other witnesses in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington DC. But it was not allowed into North Korea itself.
It recommends the UN Security Council refer its findings to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Testimony by North Korean defectors at last year's hearings produced chilling accounts of systematic rape, murder and torture, and suffering during the famine of the late 1990s. The commission says it plans to release on Monday, along with the report, a 372-page document with excerpts of witness testimony.
The report refers to murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortion, sexual violence, forcible transfers and forced disappearances, and persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds.
It also cites the overall system of political repression, the "songbun" class system that discriminates against North Koreans on the basis of their family's perceived loyalty to the regime, and executions and punishment through forced labour in the North's gulag.
A spokesman for North Korea's UN Mission in New York who refused to give his name told the AP: "We totally reject the unfounded findings of the Commission of Inquiry regarding crimes against humanity. We will never accept that."
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