SEOUL, South Korea — The first United Nations panel of experts assigned to investigate North Korean human rights abuses urged the government in Pyongyang on Tuesday to allow them to visit, even as the North called their work slanderous.

The panel, a three-member Commission of Inquiry, was finishing five days of public hearings here in the South Korean capital, during which defectors from North Korea, many of them survivors of its labor or political prisoner camps, have provided harrowing accounts of hunger, torture, forced abortions and public executions.

Some women who testified told the commissioners how human traffickers lured them with promises of jobs and food and sold them in China, where they said they were forced into prostitution or a slavelike life in rural families. Relatives of South Koreans who were taken to the North during the 1950-53 Korean War or whose fishing boats were seized by North Korean gunboats in postwar years also appealed for international attention to the fate of their missing fathers and siblings.

Michael Donald Kirby, head of the commission, said, “We are the eyes and ears of the international community.” Speaking during a news conference in Seoul on Tuesday, he appealed for access to North Korea. He said his panel would “have no preconceptions and act with complete independence” in its investigation.