ICC Note:

A North Korean labor camp has almost doubled in size, despite the government’s denial that it exists according to a recent report by Amnesty International. A report by the UN found that “hundreds of thousands” of prisoners had died in the camps over the last fifty years. It is estimated there are up to 120,000 currently serving in these camps, among which there are an estimated 30,000 to 70,000 Christians. Amnesty’s report adds, “These camps constitute the cornerstone of the country’s large infrastructure dedicated to political repression and social control that enables widespread and systematic human rights abuses.”

11/30/2016 North Korea (CNN) – Newly-released satellite images show that North Korea’s prison camp system, where detainees are subjected to forced labor, torture, starvation, rape and death, may be expanding.

Up to 120,000 men, women and children are imprisoned in the gulags, known as “kwanliso” in Korean, according to the United Nations.

Pyongyang officially denies that the camps exist, but multiple human rights groups have documented their ongoing operation via survivor testimony and satellite imagery.

On Tuesday, Washington-based Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) released images of Camp No. 25, a camp near Chongjin, on North Korea’s northeast coast.

According to HRNK, the map underwent an expansion before 2010, when it almost doubled in scale, and has continued to operate at its larger size.

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