The U.S. Committee for Human Rights North Korea has just released a report entitled “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps” that summarizes human rights abuses in the various prison camps in North Korea. As the executive summary states,

The report outlines two distinct systems of repression: first, a North Korean gulag of forced-labor colonies, camps, and prisons where scores of thousands of prisoners -- some political, some convicted felons -- are worked, many to their deaths, in mining, logging, farming, and industrial enterprises . . . and second, a system of smaller, shorter-term detention facilities along the North Korea-China border used to brutally punish North Koreans who flee to China -- usually in search of food during the North Korean famine crisis of the middle to late 1990s -- but are arrested by Chinese police and forcibly repatriated to [North Korea]. . .

A major phenomenon of repression associated with the [prison camps] is the shockingly large number of deaths in detention from slave labor under dangerous circumstances and from starvation-level food rations. . . States, of course, have the right to deprive duly convicted criminals of liberty and remove them from society. States do not have the right to deprive prisoners of their right to food, or to work them, literally, to death.

It’s certainly not a pleasant subject but one that deserves more attention from Asian Americans and for that matter, all Americans in general.