Tomas Ojea Quintana, the visiting U.N. special rapporteur on North Korea, said he will make every effort to resolve the abduction issue.

"I will commit myself" to making progress on the issue, Ojea Quintana said Thursday at a Diet meeting with a cross-party group of lawmakers seeking the return of Japanese who were abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s.

"We want to ask the United Nations to give further weight to the abduction issue," former economy minister Takeo Hiranuma, who leads the group, said as the meeting began. The session was open to the media.