March 14th, 2013 at 4:15 am » Comments (5)

Christiane Amanpour interviews Blaine Harden as part of a piece she put together on North Korea: It’s one of Washington’s most truculent adversaries. North Korea’s nuclear tests and sharp rhetoric have raised concerns about the safety of South Korea and how the United States ought to respond. The North Koreans have even threatened to pull out of the armistice that ended the Korean War. Yet North Korea’s harsh treatment of its own citizens – up to 200,000 people are believed to live under brutal conditions in prison camps – is
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January 23rd, 2013 at 6:30 pm » Comments (1)

Curtis Melvin over NK Econ Watch has gotten recognized in the Chosun Ilbo for uncovering a new North Korean concentration camp: North Korea has built a new compound believed to be a prison camp next to an existing one in Kaechon, South Pyongan Province, according to a U.S. satellite imagery expert. “I noticed the addition of a new area that bears striking similarity to other known ‘kwan-li-so’ or prison camps,” Curtis Melvin wrote on his blog North Korean Economy Watch on Friday. Going by Google Earth images, the compound was
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January 22nd, 2010 at 9:37 am » Comments (5)

Nothing really groundbreaking here other than the fact the Korean government is publicly commenting on the number of people imprisoned in North Korean concentration camps: The National Human Rights Commission of Korea announced on Wednesday the results of its survey on human rights violations in concentration camps for political prisoners in North Korea. The commission said there are six such detainment facilities in the North, down from 13 in the 1970s, and the number of detainees is estimated to be about 200-thousand. It said beatings and torture are widespread in
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September 1st, 2009 at 6:20 am » Comments (2)

Here is further information about the crackdown currently going on along the North Korean border which has been so great the North Koreans established yet another gulag to put defectors into: Amid signs of mass defections as the international community began putting pressure on North Korea in the wake of its latest nuclear test, the regime in early May gave orders that no resident was to be allowed to flee the country, followed by a massive crackdown. The National Defense Commission gave village-to-village indoctrination lectures on a massive scale, apparently
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July 22nd, 2009 at 7:21 pm » Comments (3)

The Washington Post had a great article this week in regards to North Korea’s system of concentration camps.  What stood out the most to me was how the US government and even North Korean human rights groups are determined to ignore the worst human rights violation of our time: Images and accounts of the North Korean gulag become sharper, more harrowing and more accessible with each passing year. A distillation of testimony from survivors and former guards, newly published by the Korean Bar Association, details the daily lives of 200,000
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July 22nd, 2009 at 5:56 am » Comments (22)

For those that have watched Crossing Heaven’s Borders and want to get an even deeper understanding of the North Korean system of concentration camps that await defectors that are returned to North Korea, I highly recommend reading Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor by North Korean defector Kim Yong: The book was translated by Kim Suk-young who is actually a unusual person to translate such a book considering she works in the theater and dance department at the University of California Santa Barbara.  She actually did
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July 21st, 2009 at 3:31 pm » Comments (3)

Via DPRK Forum comes this video from Journeyman Pictures that features the stories of North Korean defectors such as Shin Dong-hyuk who was born into and escaped from North Korea’s infamous Camp 14: You can read more about Shin here.