North Korea is estimated to be holding some 154,000 political prisoners in six large camps across the country, a South Korean lawmaker said on Saturday.
North Korean political prisoners are sent to the camps without trial and are condemned to life in prison in five of them, despite the North’s new Constitution calling for respecting human rights, Yoon Sang-hyun, a lawmaker with the ruling Grand National Party, said in a statement.
The six camps are for political prisoners and are in addition to prisons for people who commit crimes such as murder and robbery.
Prisoners are forced to toil for more than 10 hours a day, are fed a poor diet and do not receive medical aid. They are also banned from communicating with their families while in prison, Yoon said in the statement.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il wields absolute power in the communist state of 24 million people and allegedly inmates cannot be executed without Kim’s knowledge or direction, activists say.
North Korea has long had one of the world’s worst human rights records, but rejects outside criticism on its alleged human rights abuses and the existence of gulags, denouncing it as part of a US attempt to overthrow its regime.
But in April, the North revised its Constitution to say the state “respects and protects” human rights, according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles North Korean relations.
Activists, however, say the North’s abuses on its citizens remain unchanged.
Yoon said in his statement that North Korea held some 200,000 political prisoners in 10 camps into the 1990s, but it closed four of them in the late 1990s in response to condemnation by the international community.
Yoon’s aide said his office got the figures and other information on prison camps from the South Korean government as part of ongoing annual parliamentary inspections of the government ministries and agencies. He did not say how the South Korean government obtained the information.
Offenses meriting banishment to a prison camp include everything from disparaging leader Kim Jong-il to trying to flee the country, defectors and prison survivors say.
“North Korea perpetrates various crimes against humanity, including public executions, tortures or rapes, against those who try to escape,” Yoon said, citing the government’s information.
Under a decade of liberal rule, South Korea had failed to publicly raise human rights problems in North Korea out of concern its criticism would anger Pyongyang and complicate reconciliation between the countries that still remain technically at war.
The two Koreas embarked on unprecedented rapprochement after their leaders met for their first-ever summit in 2000 and a second summit in 2007.
Seoul has changed its approach to North Korea since last year, however, when conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office with a pledge not to shy away from criticizing North Korea’s authoritarian regime.
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