South Korea's Lee rebuffed North offer to meet: report

SEOUL (Reuters) - New South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who has pledged a tougher policy in dealing with North Korea, rebuffed his communist neighbor's offer to meet in January, a news report said on Wednesday.

The proposal was made through South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) "for responsible officials from the two sides to meet," the conservative Dong-a Ilbo newspaper quoted an unnamed government official as saying.

"But President Lee demanded clarification on the purpose of such a meeting, and the North subsequently suspended attempts to make contact," the official said.

A spokesman for presidential Blue House would neither confirm or deny the report, saying there are frequent contacts between the North and South.

Spokesman Lee Dong-kwan said the president felt: "it was not appropriate to meet without principle or with no results expected."

The NIS said it knew nothing of the report and declined further comment.

Lee said repeatedly during his campaign for December's presidential election, which he won easily, that he would be harder on North Korea than his predecessors if it continued to resist international pressure to dismantle its nuclear threat, but reward it handsomely if it complied.

North Korea has not commented on Lee in the more than two months since his election.

Lee's administration broke from the soft-line taken by the outgoing government towards its prickly neighbor when an envoy told a U.N. rights council earlier this week that North Korea should take appropriate actions to improve its human rights conditions.

The North, which bristles at any criticism of its rights record, said the comments from the South gave it "strong doubts" about whether it was committed to improving ties, the South's Foreign Ministry said.

Human rights groups say the reclusive North has one of the worst rights records in the world, with Pyongyang using public executions to intimidate the masses and maintaining a vast network of political prisons to stamp out dissent.

(Reporting by Jack Kim; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Jon Herskovitz)