NORTH Korean tyrant Kim Jong-un is running a vast network of brutal political gulags where tens of thousands of men, women and children are worked to death, tortured and executed.
A shocking new report reveals that up to 65,000 enemies of the Stalinist state are currently rotting in four prison camps scattered across the country’s mountainous interior.
Prisoners from Camp 14, Camp 16, Camp 18 and Camp 25 are jailed for the most trivial “crimes” — from watching a South Korean broadcast to practising Christianity.
According to the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) report, they are then subjected to forced labour, starvation and unspeakable violence.
The North still denies the existence of these camps, yet satellite imagery and defector testimonies leave no doubt.
A United Nations report said: “Detailed satellite imagery, as well as the corroborated testimony of scores of former prisoners… established the existence of this prison system, and the horrific practices that occur therein, beyond any doubt.”
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Hell on earth
Inside the nightmarish facilities – known as kwanliso – dissenters, their families, and even children are enslaved for life.
Camp 14, built in 1965 in Kaechon, expanded after the 2013 purge of Kim’s uncle Jang Song-thaek, whose followers were thrown into the gulag.
Camp 16, near the Punggye-ri nuclear site, is believed to use inmates as slave labour to build and maintain the regime’s weapons programme.
At Camp 25, in Chongjin, around 5,800 prisoners are crammed into a facility that has doubled the size under Kim’s reign, with gallows, electric fences and even crematoriums visible from space.
According to human rights group HRNK, “Our satellite imagery analysis… appears to confirm the sustained, if not increased importance of the use of forced labour under Kim Jong-un.”
The report estimates that approximately 53,000 to 65,000 people are detained across the four prisons, a decrease from a 80,000 to 120,000 estimate in 2013.
But that’s not due to any human rights improvement.
Instead, one of the most notorious sites, Camp 15 (Yodok), was simply shut down, its inmates believed to have been executed, transferred or worked to death.
Camp 16: where no one leaves alive
Nothing causes more terror in North Koreans than Camp 16.
The sprawling, secretive hellhole covers 216 square miles, three times the size of Washington DC and is surrounded by a 75-mile ring guard posts and machine-gun towers.
Not a single prisoner is known to have escaped.
Up to 20,000 people — including senior officials accused of disloyalty — are imprisoned here.
Survivors say they are worked 20 hours a day in mines, logging sites and farms, then subjected to nightly “ideology struggle sessions” where they are forced to denounce and beat one another.
Former inmates describe public executions, 4ft torture cells where prisoners cannot stand or lie down, and routine rape by guards, after which victims “disappear”.
Those caught trying to flee are shot, hanged or beaten to death.
One former guard admitted women raped by visiting officials were later executed to keep the crimes secret.
They said: “After a night of ‘servicing’ the officials, the women had to die because the secret could not get out.”
Amnesty International told The Sun in 2016 it estimated 40 per cent of prisoners die from malnutrition, while many are jailed without even knowing their alleged crime.
Thousands are sent under “guilt by association” — children punished for the supposed sins of their parents.
Director Kate Allen said at the time: “These camps are a stain on civilised society.”
Drawings of horror
Rare glimpses inside this hidden horror have emerged thanks to defectors like Kim Kwang-il, jailed for three years in a gulag for smuggling pine nuts.
His harrowing sketches, submitted to the UN, show inmates tortured in grotesque stress positions.
“We are supposed to think there’s an imaginary motorcycle and we are supposed to be in this position as if we are riding,” he said.
“And if we stand like this there’s no way that you can hold that position for a long time.
“You are bound to fall forward… Prisoners are forced to hold themselves in these positions until they sweat enough to fill a glass beneath them.”
Such testimony underpins the UN’s call for Kim Jong-un to face trial at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
Yet China and Russia have repeatedly blocked such moves.
‘Worse than Nazis’
Thomas Buergenthal, a child survivor of Auschwitz, says Kim’s gulags are even more depraved.
“I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps,” he said.
UN investigations have accused Kim of murder, enslavement, torture, rape, forced abortions, starvation and extermination on a mass scale.
Navi Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said: “There is not a comparable situation anywhere in the world, past or present… This is really an atrocity at the maximum level.”
The human cost of Kim’s gulag state is told most powerfully by those who have escaped.
Defector Ji Hyun Park fled twice — the first time under gunfire across a frozen river.
She told The Sun of how was sold into sexual slavery in China, repatriated, tortured and forced into back-breaking labour until her leg bone was exposed. Her ordeal spanned a decade before she finally reached safety in the UK.
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In North Korea, she said, people are treated like “animals” — constantly watched, terrified of saying the wrong thing.
“Those who criticised or broke the rules were thrown into political prisons,” Ji said.