Search Results for: camp 22

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...

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...

Reader Andy Green* has spotted a significant expansion of Camp 12, Cheongo-ri. [Before: Christmas Day, 2008. What were you doing that day?] [After: April 13, 2013] Andy speculates, reasonably I think, that the expansion is a barracks. You can see that the perimeter wall and guard towers were also expanded around the new buildings. If it is a barracks, it probably couldn’t hold more than a few hundred prisoners. This isn’t the answer to the question of what happened to...

A new report by Amnesty International is providing our first eyewitness account of conditions at Camp 16, images of which were first published at this very blog back in February of 2007, using clues provided in David Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag. In April 2012, I followed up with an extensive analysis of Camp 16 imagery, in an attempt to collect and publish all of the open-source information about this largest and least-understood of all of North Korea’s prison camps. Even...

The newest update on Camps 18 and 22 from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) continues to draw news coverage, most recently in the form of this grim report by Chico Harlan of The Washington Post. Harlan reports that the camps’ population is now likely between 80,000 and 120,000, much lower than the previous estimate of 200,000. Part of this decline reflects a correction of previous overestimates of the population. I’d mentioned here and here, for example, my...

Ah, North Korea — as gifted at publicity as it at humanity. Perhaps just as Blaine Harden was sending the manuscript for Escape from Camp 14 to his publisher, shortly before the book would generate intense interest among those on the Outer Earth who still did not know about North Korea’s gulags, North Korea may have been scratching out a new prison compound contiguous to Camp 14’s northern boundary. In due course, Curtis spots it: A few observations about this:...