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The US-based international organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its data by interviewing dozens of former detainees and North Korean officials to draw attention to the inhumane living conditions in places of detention, often amounting to torture.
North Korea, which has a nuclear weapon and has been accused by the United Nations and other critics of widespread human rights abuses, is an isolated state, so little is known about its criminal justice system.
The illegal treatment of detainees – hitting or kicking – is “particularly brutal” in the first phase of pretrial detention, investigators said.
“The rules state that there can be no beatings, but we need confessions during the investigation and in the initial stages of the preliminary investigation,” said the former police officer.
“So you have to hit to get a confession,” he said.
Former detainees said inmates were forced to kneel or sit cross-legged on the ground even after 16 hours a day, and the slightest movement was punished.
Penalties can range from beatings, with sticks, hands or leather belts, to being ordered to search the yard up to 1,000 times.
“If I or others moved (in the cell), the guards would have told me or other inmates to put our hands through the bars and step on them with heavy shoes,” said Park Ji Cheolas, a former detainee.
“They treat you worse there than an animal, and they end up like that,” added another detainee, Yoon Young Cheolas.
Some women said they had been sexually abused in detention centers.
Kim Sun Young, a former trafficker who fled North Korea in 2015, said she was raped by an interrogator at the detention center.
The woman said another police officer grabbed her under her clothes during interrogation, but she said she “didn’t have the strength to resist.”
The report calls on Pyongyang to “end the widespread torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (of detainees) in places of detention.” HRW also called on South Korea, the United States and other United Nations states to put pressure on the North Korean government.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un took control of the country from his father, Kim Jong Il, and founding grandfather Kim Il Sung.
The UN accuses North Korea of ”systematic, widespread and flagrant” human rights abuses, including torture, extrajudicial executions and detention camps.
Pyongyang claims that it defends and promotes “real human rights” and argues that the West has no right to set human rights standards for the rest of the world.
North Korea opposes international criticism, calling it a smear campaign aimed at undermining the “sacred socialist system.”
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