North Korea’s brutal prison camps, where hundreds of thousands of people are languishing away in horrid conditions, are home to most of the world’s worst human rights abuses, a report released Tuesday revealed.
The Kim family has created a network of prison camps that have no parallel in the modern world. Thomas Buergenthal, an Auschwitz survivor and a judge who helped prepare the new report on the tragedies of North Korea’s prisons told the Washington Post North Korea’s camps are “as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in the Nazi camps.”
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and other state officials should be held responsible for ten of the 11 crimes against humanity outlined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, specifically murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearances, and the inhumane act of forced starvation, the International Bar Association (IBA) War Crimes Committee asserted in a new report, the result of a two-year investigation into North Korea’s rampant human rights violations.
The IBA put together a detailed report on the horrors of the North’s prison camps, where the murderous regime sends those individuals deemed undesirable by the state.
“The inmates are supposed to die,” former North Korean prison guard Ahn Myong-chol revealed. The North’s prisons are designed to eliminate the “seed” of three generations of anti-state criminals.
The hardships of forced labor combined with starvation and nonexistent medical care are intended to result in death, and when those fail, the prison guards take matters into their own hands. Prisoners are executed for stealing food, attempting to escape, and to set an example for other inmates.
Children are not exempt, and at one camp, around 2,000 prisoners — mostly children — died from malnutrition. There are reportedly mass graves scattered across North Korea.
Former political prisoner Yong Kim testified that after a riot in the 1990s at Camp 14, the North Korean prison guards executed 1,500 inmates and tossed their bodies in an abandoned mine. In another incident, a supervising soldier rolled a log down a steep mountainside, killing ten of the prisoners tasked with transporting timber. At another camp, four pregnant women were shot for refusing to run up and down a mountain to induce a miscarriage, part of the culture of forced abortions rampant in North Korea. During the chaos, a dozen prisoners attempted to escape, but they were but they were cut down by machine gun fire.
There are countless stories like these, tales of tragic deaths at the hands of a callous regime.
“Those who die are the lucky ones,” a former North Korean prison guard told reporters earlier this year, as torture is the norm inside North Korea’s prison facilities.
Former State Security Department official Choi Hyun-jun revealed that torture involving water and electricity were “standard practice” in the camps. One prisoner described being hung upside down from the ceiling while guards tortured him with both water and fire as others poured spicy pepper water into his nose and mouth. In other instances, guards stripped prisoners naked and handcuffed them together in the cold winter snow.
Sexual assault is also extremely pervasive in the camps, where the guards are specifically taught not to view the prisoners as human beings.
“If a woman refuses to accept the demands of SSD officers, the officers make an excuse and easily kill her,” a former officer revealed. Former prisoner Kim Su-jong testified that his mother took her own life after she was raped by an officer at Camp 18. The rape of teenage girls and their subsequent suicides became so common that guards were dispatched to the river to watch for inmates attempting to end it all in shame.
Lee Baek-lyong witnessed a woman being raped by a security officer at Camp 15. Afterwards, the assailant sexually tormented the woman and then beat her mercilessly. Within a week of the rape, the woman died from her injuries.
Among those who suffer in the camps, Christians are often the most harshly persecuted. “Christians were reactionaries and there were lots of instructions to wipe out the seed of reactionaries,” one former guard revealed. Many were sent to special detention centers, where many inmates were never seen or heard from again.
The IBA War Crimes Committee calls on the international community to empower the International Criminal Court or similar judicial body to investigate the crimes committed by the Kim family and other senior regime officials and hold them accountable for their reported crimes against humanity.
Send tips to ryan@
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.