North Korean Prison Camps Massive and Growing

SEOUL — New satellite images and firsthand accounts from former political prisoners and former jailers in North Korea have confirmed the massive scale and bleak conditions of the penal system in the secretive North, according to a report released Wednesday by the human rights group Amnesty International.

Former inmates at the political labor camp at Yodok said they were frequently tortured and had been forced to watch executions of fellow prisoners, the report said, noting that North Korea’s network of political prisons, known as “kwan li-so,” is estimated to hold some 200,000 inmates.

“North Korea can no longer deny the undeniable,” said Sam Zarifi, the Asia Pacific director of Amnesty International. “For decades the authorities have refused to admit to the existence of mass political prison camps. These are places out of sight of the rest of the world, where almost the entire range of human rights protections that international law has tried to set up for the last 60 years are ignored.”

After comparing recent satellite photos of prison camps with images from 10 years ago, Mr. Zarifi said, his group became concerned that the “prison camps appear to be growing in size.”

North Korea’s work farms and prison factories are the world’s most notorious, according to human rights experts. Political prisoners sentenced to hard labor initially included landlords, purged party officials and the religiously active, according to Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, the authors of “Witness to Transformation,” an authoritative study of North Korean refugees.

Political prisons, they said, also now hold “anyone guilty of political or ideological crimes or even suspected of disloyalty,” adding that the system shows “little pretense of due process.”

Son Hyang-sun, a woman who defected from North Korea 15 years ago because she was starving, said she was apprehended on her first escape attempt and was taken back to the North. She was convicted and jailed for four months, spending part of that time in a political prison.

“They tortured me with an electric stick, yes, a cattle prod,” she said in an interview with the International Herald Tribune. “They stuck it everywhere.”

A recent U.S. State Department report on human rights in North Korea said “detainees and prisoners consistently reported violence and torture.”

A former Yodok inmate who was interviewed last month by Amnesty, Jeong Kyoung-il, said that deaths in the prison were almost daily occurrences. But under the perilous conditions in the camp, the deaths of fellow prisoners came to be seen in a depraved and desperate light.

“Frankly, unlike in a normal society, we would like it, rather than feel sad, because if you bring a dead body and bury it, you would be given another bowl of food,” Mr. Jeong said.

“I used to take charge of burying dead people’s bodies. When an officer told me to, I gathered some people and buried the bodies. After receiving extra food for the job, we felt glad rather than feeling sad.”