(Jan. 11) — North Korea called today for talks with the United States aimed at reaching a peace treaty to replace the truce that ended the 1950-53 Korean War, and indicated that such a document is a condition for its returning to international talks about giving up its nuclear weapons program.

“If a peace treaty is signed, it will help resolve hostile relations between North Korea and the United States and speed up the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement put out by the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA.

But Washington’s newly appointed envoy for human rights in North Korea said today that ties can only improve once Pyongyang ends the systemic abuse of its citizens. The envoy, Robert R. King, called the North’s record on rights “appalling,” saying they would impede any efforts to normalize relations between the two countries.

North Korea has called for direct peace talks before, but today’s proposal was seen as an attempt to shift the focus of the six-nation nuclear talks, where a peace treaty has been put on the back burner until significant progress is made on persuading Pyongyang to set its nuclear weapons aside.

North Korea, which was hit with new economic sanctions by the United Nations in May after it carried out new nuclear and ballistic tests, might be trying to encourage desperately needed foreign aid by offering to enter peace talks. Pyongyang has boycotted the nuclear negotiations since April but before that had begun to disable nuclear facilities in return for overseas aid.

Human rights has been a longtime hot issue with the U.S. and is not one that Washington seems ready to drop. “It is one of the worst places in terms of human rights,” King said in his first visit to Seoul today. “A relationship with the United States and North Korea will have to involve human rights.”

North Korea said it concluded that all agreements were bound to collapse unless the two sides build mutual trust. To build such confidence, the statement said, “It is essential to conclude a peace treaty for terminating the state of war, a root cause of the hostile relations.”

The statement repeated Pyongyang’s long-held contention that North Korea would not have built a nuclear weapon if it had been assured of peace by the United States.

United Nations forces led by the U.S. fighting on behalf of South Korea signed the ceasefire with North Korea and China on July 27, 1953, ending active hostilities. But the two Koreas are technically still at war, and more than 1 million troops are positioned along their border.

From 1997 to 1999, the two Koreas, the United States and China held six rounds of peace talks that produced no agreement.

With its latest proposal, the North “is trying to gain the initiative as it prepares to return to six-nation talks,” Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea analyst at Dongguk University in Seoul, told The New York Times. Kim said he expected some haggling between Pyongyang and Seoul over whether South Korea should be included.