U.N Investigator: North Korean Prisons Like Nothing Seen Since Nazi Atrocities

North Koreans forced into prisons camps live out an existence unlike any seen since the killing fields of Cambodia or the horrors of World War II, according to the head of a U.N. panel assigned to investigate Pyongyang’s human rights violations.

In March, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted to create an Independent Commission of Inquiry into North Korea’s human rights violations, the first of its kind designated to tackle the hermit kingdom’s abuses. Michael Kirby, a retired Australian judge, was named to lead the three-member panel, which North Korea immediately banned from entering the country’s borders, saying that it “totally and categorically rejects the Commission of Inquiry.”

Undaunted, the team began conducting interviews with refugees and defectors in South Korea and Japan earlier this year. One former camp inmate told investigators that he was lucky when a warden ordered the tip of his finger chopped off for damaging a piece of sewing equipment used to carry out forced labor — he could easily have been executed for the transgression.

Think Progress

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