Rape, forced abortions and torture: these are just some of the gross abuses that characterize North Korean prisons. This is evident from a published this week report from non-profit organization Korea Future, which focuses on human rights in the East Asian dictatorship. Never before has an organization mapped human rights violations in North Korea in such detail.
NGO staff interviewed hundreds of survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of abuse who have fled North Korea. The organization also examined satellite images and read official prison documents. The results are shocking: Future Korea speaks of 1,000 cases of torture, hundreds of examples of rape and other forms of sexual violence.
The organization also cites nearly a thousand examples of starvation and 56 cases of forced abortions. According to the organization, North Koreans end up in jail when their behavior or beliefs are not in line with those of leader Kim Jong-un. The NGO compares the practices in the prisons to those in gulags in the Soviet era.
Future Korea highlights some examples of serious human rights violations. When a heavily pregnant woman tried to cross the border with two other North Koreans, she was forced to have an abortion. Another was fed only eighty grams of corn a day, forcing him to eat cockroaches and rodents to survive.
‘Unprecedented self-isolation’
The findings will be released in the same month as a publication from the UN human rights branch to North Korea’s “unprecedented self-isolation” during the corona pandemic. In it, UN expert Elizabeth Salmón speaks, among other things, about North Koreans who “froze to death” during cold winter months. According to her, large numbers of residents had no money to heat their homes and were forced to live on the streets, because they sold their homes as a last resort.
Salmón also says that it was especially difficult for women who worked in the informal sector during the pandemic during the dictatorship, because it was more difficult for them to find work. The elderly and homeless also had an even harder time than before the pandemic.