Search Results for: camps

September 4, 2015

N. Korea Glasnost Watch: Video shows men sent to camps for copying American movies

The Telegraph has obtained guerrilla footage of two men, one 27 and one 30, being tried and sentenced to nine months in a labor camp for copying and selling American movies. The North Korean judge, or official, says that one of the defendants is “a person immersed in the corrupt ideology of capitalism” and tells the crowd that the criminal acts were “revealed by agents in South Korea operated by our party.” During the full 12 minutes of footage, filmed...

Categories Censorship/Subversion/The Camps
November 14, 2014

KINU survey: Conditions in N. Korean labor camps worsen

So apparently, that was still possible, then: The heinous conditions faced by malnourished and overworked North Korean inmates in reeducation camps has led to a growing number of deaths, according to a report released on Thursday. Data from the paper reveals that prisoners within these facilities may be living in an environment prone to egregious human rights violations– just as in political prison camps. Findings from the report were announced by Lee Keum Soon, Director of the Center for North...

Categories The Camps
October 8, 2014

North Korea denies having prison camps, admits “reform through labor camps”

Choe Myong Nam, a North Korean foreign ministry official in charge of U.N. affairs and human rights issues, said at a briefing with reporters that his country has no prison camps and, in practice, “no prison, things like that.” But he briefly discussed the labor camps. “Both in law and practice, we do have reform through labor detention camps — no, detention centers — where people are improved through their mentality and look on their wrongdoings,” he said. [AP] The...

Categories The Camps
September 24, 2014

Kerry to North Korea: “[C]lose those camps … shut this evil system down.”

It’s no secret to readers of this site that I’ve never been an admirer of John Kerry. His tenure has been a rolling catastrophe for our national security, in a way that even a rank amateur could have predicted years ago. It’s often difficult to see that he has a North Korea policy at all. Not so long ago, I criticized Kerry for showing no sign of pressing for action on the U.N. Commission of Inquiry report on human rights in North Korea. But...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
February 20, 2014

Crowdsourcing the hunt for North Korea’s prisons and prison camps

The world didn’t awaken to the horrors in North Korea in time save Kim Jong Il’s victims or hold him accountable, but it may be doing so in time to give Kim Jong Un some pause as he prosecutes his bloody purges. Various reports from inside North Korea — reports that are impossible to verify — say that he has carried out mass arrests and executions, both in Pyongyang and near the border regions that represent the greatest threat to...

Categories The Camps
October 9, 2012

Conference on North Korean political prison camps and refugees, this Friday in Los Angeles

This Friday, the Museum of Tolerance, in cooperation with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Liberty in North Korea and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, will host a conference on human rights in North Korea. According to the agenda flyer, which you can see at this link, “The event will conclude with a book signing by Melanie Kirkpatrick (author of Escape from North Korea, The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad), Blaine Harden (author of Escape from Camp 14),...

Categories Anju Links/Refugees/The Camps
May 31, 2012

North Korea’s Political Prison Camps Can’t Be Denied or Ignored Anymore

North Korea says they don’t exist. For years, South Korea didn’t want anyone to talk about them, and even now, it seldom does, at least directly. Our President, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has never said a word about them in public. A few years ago, a foreign service officer was reviewing a draft of State’s annual human rights report on North Korea and asked its author to “sacrifice a few adjectives for the cause” of appeasing the...

Categories The Camps
April 10, 2012

New Edition of “The Hidden Gulag” Adds New Imagery, Witness Accounts to Our Understanding of North Korea’s Prison Camps

Here.  Of personal interest to me is that witnesses have confirmed that this is indeed Camp 12, Chongo-ri, and this is indeed Camp 25, Chongjin.  There aren’t any new images of Camp 16 here, but in a few days, I’ll be posting an entire page of imagery of that camp, and the nuclear test site next door.  Thanks to David Hawk, Chuck Downs, Greg Scarlatoiu, and the HRNK board for giving me the opportunity to help with this.  David’s first...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps
April 3, 2012

Rising attention on North Korea’s prison camps

A few years ago, I spent what felt like an hour or two on Skype with The Washington Post‘s Blaine Harden, sharing and explaining satellite imagery of North Korea’s prison camp system. No doubt, Harden talked to plenty of other people, too, and the result was an excellent report and interactive graphic about the camps. A few months later, Harden turned over the Post‘s North Korea coverage to Chico Harlan, and now we know why. Harden went on sabbatical to...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps
May 7, 2011

Too Little, Too Late, But Better than Nothing: Amnesty International on North Korea’s Political Prison Camps

Six years after it breathlessly declared Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our time,” Amnesty International has gotten around to concluding that North Korea “can no longer deny the undeniable:” “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 last 60 years are ignored. “As North Korea seems to be moving towards a new leader in Kim Jong-un and a...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps
March 21, 2011

Anju Links, including how to host your own NK political prison camps exhibition

Not the same as Joshua, but here are a few links I’ve found interesting of late. _________________________________ PSCORE’s regularly been posting news articles in English the last few months (don’t see RSS, sent them an email about that maybe a month ago). _________________________________ Host your own NKHRs exhibition:  SAGE Korea, the group that held an exhibition on North Korea’s political prison camp system, “Where Love Does Not Exist,” is putting its contents on the web for download so other groups...

Categories Anju Links/The Camps
February 24, 2010

The History of North Korea’s Political Prison Camps

Open News has an interesting history of the camps that, among other interesting educated guesses, suggests that 50% of the largest camps’ (kwan-li-so) population is composed of people who are merely family members of those accused of disloyalty to the state: The North Korean regime, as it consolidated its power, killed religious leaders, the pro-Japanese, and landowners, while imprisoning their family members in the so called “forced labor camps. In 1947, there were 17 of these forced labor camps. Between...

Categories History/Human Rights/The Camps
October 19, 2009

North Korean official media denies that the camps exist and claims that all of its people lead “the most dignified and happy life.”

Yoon Sang-Hyun, from the ruling Grand National Party, said the North had 10 camps holding about 200,000 prisoners until the late 1990s when it closed down four of them amid mounting international criticism. “Currently, it holds 154,000 prisoners in six places,” he was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency. [AFP] I don’t know what a South Korean lawmaker is going on when he suggests that North Korea’s gulag inmate population might actually have fallen to 154,000, but when I...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps
September 29, 2009

Kang Chol Hwan on the Concentration Camps

Kang makes a compelling argument for understanding the “root cause” of all of our problems with North Korea: The silence of the international community on the barbaric massacres in the concentration camps committed by Kim Jong-il borders on the criminal. Some 17,000 North Korean defectors in the South are complaining about the atrocity, but no country pays any attention. Even the South Korean government and people do not realize how serious the problem is. As a surgeon may kill a...

Categories Human Rights/The Camps
August 30, 2009

Daily NK Reports Uprisings in Labor Camps, Factory

Recently, the North Korean regime decided that its emaciated slaves hadn’t worked hard enough and declared a “150-day battle,” sending more of them to labor in the countryside and in the factories. The “battle,” however, appears to have taken a turn the authorities didn’t anticipate, according to an exile organization called North Korean Intellectuals Solidarity: It reported, “In a provincial labor-training camp located in Dongheung-district, Hamheung, South Hamkyung Province, a camp inspector, who was also a manager in the Department...

Categories Resistance/The Camps
August 16, 2009

Camps 14 & 18 Google Earth Page Published

It took months to do it, but I’ve finally published a Google Earth page for Camps 14 and 18. This page accumulates all of the newly available witness accounts, scholarly research, and satellite imagery of the camps, which share very little except geographical proximity. I owe my deepest thanks to a reader who forwarded me a copy of the Korean Bar Association’s 2008 human rights report, which proved to be an invaluable resource for this project, and for others to...

Categories Google Earth/Human Rights/The Camps