North Korean Prison 'Hell' Revealed: Tortured to Forced Abortion

North Korean Prison 'Hell' Revealed: Tortured to Forced Abortion

-- Extrajudicial killings, imprisonment without trial, torture, starvation, rape, and forced abortions are brutal acts that are often experienced by inmates in North Korean prisons.

Reporting from CNN, the Non-Profit Organization Korea Future conducted interviews with former prisoners, and got a more detailed description of the torture experienced by the victims.

Among the cases highlighted by Korea Future of the victims are three people who were jailed after being caught trying to cross the border and defecting.

The first victim was forced to have an abortion when she was 7 months pregnant. Worse, the victim was only fed corn weighing 80 grams a day. As a result, he lost from 60 kilograms to 37 kilograms in one day.

Other victims were forced to survive only by eating animal feed until they were emaciated, and were even subjected to quite severe beatings.

"I didn't feel like a human being. We couldn't move around in the cell and we had to sit with our hands at our sides. Because we couldn't look up, we could only look down," said one inmate.

A male survivor who testified for Korea Future said he was arrested several times for defection. For example, in 2000 and 2017, for trying to defect to China to find work.

While in prison, he said he saw guards rape female inmates, beat them, and then force them to walk on their knees.

The ex-convict said the five inmates were held in a single 6.6-square-meter room without heating even during North Korea's winter which reached minus 23 degrees Celsius.

In addition to convicts detained for defection or other crimes, North Korea is also known to have a political prison called 'kwalliso'.

In kwalliso, people who disagree with the Kim Jong Un regime are thrown into political prisons.

It is suspected that up to now there are 120 thousand people detained in Kwalliso, tens of thousands of people have even died due to atrocities in the prison.

"The goal of North Korea's penal system is to isolate people from society, especially as opposed to upholding the sole authority of the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un," the report said.

"Prisoners were re-educated through forced labor, ideological instruction, and brutal punishments with the aim of coercing obedience and loyalty to the Supreme Leader," the report continued.

Violating Human Rights

Representative of the UN Human Rights Office in Seoul, James Heenan, said many North Korean defectors do not realize that what they are experiencing is a human rights violation. So according to him, the first thing ex-convicts need to realize is that what they have experienced so far is torture.

"Sometimes they think they are beaten and tortured because they deserve it. So the problem is knowledge of human rights is the key," said Heenan.

These prisoners were arbitrarily detained, received bad treatment in terms of health, food and even sanitation, and even experienced extrajudicial killings.

Heenan said the situation in North Korea's detention facilities was one of the most egregious examples of human rights violations.

"This is what the UN Commission concluded that matters such as torture and ill-treatment that occurred in these facilities reached the level of crimes against humanity," he concluded.

North Korea has always denied accusations of human rights abuses whether in prisons or other places.

North Korea says the accusations are just a way for the United States to put pressure on Pyongyang.