CHRISTIAN SOLIDARITY WORLDWIDE

NORTH KOREAN ESCAPEES TELL UNITED NATIONS OF APPALLING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN PRISON CAMPS

March 28 2003

For immediate release

Two North Korean escapees spoke yesterday of the appalling conditions inside North Korean prison camps which drove prisoners to cannibalism and suicide.

Kang Chul Hwan was arrested aged nine along with several members of his family because of his grandfather’s alleged political crimes. He spent ten years in a prison camp in North Korea where he witnessed children being kicked to death, worked to death or publicly executed. He told delegates at a parallel meeting to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights of the horror of his years in the camp: “A third of the children died of malnourishment. In order to survive, I ate rats, cockroaches and snakes. Children simply disappeared from the camp. I can’t understand how it’s still there and it’s a great shame for all mankind that these concentration camps are still tolerated. I call for an international human rights team to investigate the human rights situation in North Korea.”

Lee Min Bok is a former North Korean Plant Genetic Engineer who was sent to a prison camp after attempting to defect to China. He survived terrible brutality at the hands of guards in both China and North Korea before being sent to the State Security Police Detention Centre in Hyesan city.

He said: “The food situation was so bad that cannibalism was quite widespread. A woman who had just given birth was so hungry that she ate her own newborn baby. Brothers ate their own brothers in order to survive.

“There were no sanitation facilities and no showers and your body became full of insects. There were tens of thousands of lice all over my body. There was no freedom to kill them. The concentration camps in North Korea today are like Hitler’s concentration camps.”

Kim Sang Hun, a South Korean who has worked for 20 years as a UN official and has devoted the last six years to aiding North Koreans, said: “Even using the most conservative estimates, the number of victims of extra-judicial killing in North Korea over the past 50 years of the regime’s entire history stands close to one million, or five percent of the entire prisoner population of 300,000 each year.

“We are of the conviction that unless we stop such crimes against humanity from being committed in North Korea today, they are bound to spread elsewhere in the world in the generations to come. In contrast to the recent case of the UN inspection team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a good number of reliable witnesses are available today to identify the locations of these camps and of prisoner burial sites in North Korea.”

Baroness Caroline Cox, a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords and President of Christian Solidarity Worldwide UK, who chaired the meeting said: “We have heard a grim and sober catalogue of extreme violations of human rights in North Korea and China, with descriptions of suffering almost beyond comprehension.

“There is a moral imperative for all of us who have the privilege of living in freedom to use our freedom to influence the international community to try and bring an end to such appalling suffering and human degradation.”

The North Koreans met with diplomatic missions and others to urge the Commission on Human Rights to adopt its first resolution on human rights in North Korea during this session.

For more information, full texts of the speeches or a full copy of Christian Solidarity Worldwide’s report on North Korea, please contact Richard Chilvers, Communications Manager, CSW, on 020 8942 8810 or email

SPEAKERS:

Kim Sang Hun worked for 20 years as a UN official. He has devoted the last six years to aiding North Koreans and exposing the grave human rights concerns affecting them in China and North Korea.

Kang Chul Hwan is a former child prisoner who was arrested aged nine along with his family and spent ten years in prison. His adolescence was marked by brutality from camp guards and twelve-hour days of grueling labour

Lee Min Bok is a former North Korean Plant Genetic Engineer who experienced the horrors of prison camps for repatriated defectors in North Korea and detention centers in China and Russia.

Baroness Caroline Cox is a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords and President of Christian Solidarity Worldwide. She is widely traveled and a well-known champion of human rights.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide is a London-based advocacy charity working on behalf of persecuted Christians and others suffering repression. The website is at http://www.csw.org.uk and the telephone number there is 020 8942 8810 and Communications Manager Richard Chilvers can be reached at

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