Author: David R. Hawk

Publisher:

Published: 2012-04-10

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780615623672

The second edition of Hidden Gulag utilizes the testimony of sixty former North Koreans who were severely and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in a vast network of penal and forced labor institutions in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for reasons not permitted by international law. By the time of the research for the second edition in 2010 and 2011, there were some 23,000 former North Koreans who recently arrived in South Korea. Included in this number are hundreds of persons formerly detained in the variety of North Korea's slave labor camps, penitentiaries, and detention facilities. Included in this number are several former prisoners who were arbitrarily imprisoned for twenty to thirty years before their escape or release from the labor camps, and their subsequent flight through China to South Korea. This newly available testimony dramatically increases our knowledge of the operation of North Korea's political prison and labor camp system. This second edition of Hidden Gulag also utilizes a recent international legal framework for the analysis of North Korea's human rights violations: the norms and standards established in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court for defining and determining crimes against humanity, which became operative in July 2002. In addition to the testimony and accounts from the former political prisoners in this report, this second edition of Hidden Gulag also includes satellite photographs of the prison camps.