(Reuters) The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea on Friday (September 18) issued new reports on the expansion of female prison camps in North Korea.
There have long been concerns about reports of atrocities including executions and torture, but they have largely been overshadowed by international alarm about North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
Held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., presenter David Hawk and author of Hidden Gulag IV: Gender Repression and Prisoner Disappearances, told reporters that women escaping North Korea for China in search of greater opportunity are detained by Chinese authorities and sent back to North Korea, where they are sent to prisons, and some political prison camps. This, he says, denies their ability to seek asylum as refugees elsewhere, as protected under international law.
“Chongo-ri prison was for men. It’s now been expanded to include a women’s section which holds approximately 1,000 women, in addition to the four to five thousand men at any given time, and what this is emblematic of is a larger situation of repression against women in which North Korean women who have gone to China from North Korea in order to seek food or employment to sustain their families back in North Korea are apprehended by the Chinese police and forcibly repatriated,” Hawk said.
“The brutality that North Korean women are subjected to upon forced repatriation from China sets up a system, a situation, where knowing the brutality that they will face if forcibly repatriated, the North Korean women are put in and accept the situation where there’s a terrible risk of being trafficked — mostly to be sold as brides to Chinese farmers in remote rural areas of Northeast China where there’s a shortage of women,” he added.
In the past, U.N. human rights investigators have said inmates in North Korea’s prison camps have suffered starvation, torture and other atrocities. Those findings have periodically been rejected by Pyongyang.