After years of neglect, the United Nations Security Council has finally taken up the issue of North Korea’s crimes against humanity. It could no longer avoid the issue after a yearlong inquiry documented a horrific pattern of human rights abuses. The next step is for the Council to insist on accountability by referring the country’s leaders to the International Criminal Court at The Hague for prosecution.

Although the world has long been aware of North Korea’s brutality, the damning report by the United Nations commission of inquiry, released in February, produced the most authoritative indictment yet. The report accused North Korea’s government of multiple offenses against its citizens, including murder, enslavement, torture, rape, forced abortions and persecution for political, racial and religious reasons. It said that as many as 120,000 people are languishing in prison camps and concluded that “the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

On Thursday, Michael Kirby, a retired Australian judge who led the three-member investigative commission, briefed the Security Council on his findings, which was the first time the body had formally taken up the issue of human rights in North Korea. The fact that 13 of the 15 council members attended the meeting testified to its importance. The two no-shows, China, North Korea’s most important foreign donor and enabler, and Russia, which often joins with China in the Council, were sadly predictable.

What’s next? The commission’s mandate has ended, but its work is too important to be left on some shelf. The first thing the United Nations should do is create a small regional office (South Korea seems most logical) that would reinforce the commission’s contributions by gathering fresh data on North Korean abuses. But that cannot be where it stops. Following the recommendation from the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva last month for criminal accountability, the Security Council should vote to send the case to The Hague.