South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se said Monday that the door for inter-Korean dialogue remains open, referring to North Korea's shutdown of a joint industrial complex in the North Korean border city of Gaeseong.

"Although the government decided to bring back all the remaining personnel at the Gaeseong complex in order to fulfill its duty of ensuring the safety of our people, the door for dialogue (with North Korea) still remains open," Yun said at an international conference in Seoul co-organized by the East Asia Institute and the foreign ministry.

Under its Korean Peninsula trust-building process initiative, the government will continue to increase pressure on North Korea and efforts to persuade the North with the aim of prodding it to make a change, he said.

Yun said President Park Geun-hye's "trust-building process initiative is based on stong deterrence. It means that South Korea would be resolute when there is need for it, and be flexible when there is need for it."

After the North rejected the South's call for talks to discuss ways of normalizing operations of the Gaeseong complex, the South's government decided to bring back all the remaining South Korean workers at the complex.

Operations of the complex came to a halt on April 6 when North Korea pulled out all of its 53,000 workers employed by 123 South Korean businesses from the complex, the last-remaining symbol of inter-Korean cooperation.