Senate OKs envoy to South Korea after rights pledge

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate confirmed a new American ambassador to South Korea on Friday, after a senator dropped his objections upon getting promises the Bush administration would urge North Korea to improve human rights.

The Senate's voice vote confirming Kathleen Stephens came just ahead of President Bush's trip next week to South Korea, a pivotal U.S. ally in Asia.

Stephens is currently a political advisor to the State Department's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, where she previously served as deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for managing U.S. ties with Japan and Korea.

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican, had held up her nomination over concerns that the Bush administration was overlooking human rights abuses as it pushed ahead with a multilateral effort to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

Votes on nominations can be blocked by any senator, and the tactic is often used on Capitol Hill to exert pressure on the executive branch.

Brownback said he had stopped obstructing Stephen's nomination after Chris Hill, the top U.S. envoy to talks on North Korea's nuclear activities, denounced North Korea's human rights record on Thursday and pledged to exhort Pyongyang to improve it.

"I think North Korea's human rights record is abysmal," Hill told a Senate committee, adding that the prison camp system in particular was a "scar" on the Korean peninsula.

Human rights will be addressed as part of any normalization of U.S. relations with Pyongyang, but the United States will not normalize relations unless North Korea "denuclearizes," he said.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell, editing by Anthony Boadle)