People with wrong associations account for the largest number of inmates in the labor camps: These include family members of wrongdoers and wrong-thinkers - wives, children and even grandchildren - because the DRPK revived the feudal "three generation, collective responsibility, guilt-by-association system." Family members are sent to the prison camps with the explicit intent to terminate family lineage. Children and grandchildren of real or imagined dissidents can anticipate short lifespans, a result of malnutrition, disease, accidents and forced labor in mines, forests, collective farms or factories for their family's presumed disloyalty to the Kim dynasty.
The former prisoners from the kwan-li-so labor camps are not charged, tried, convicted or sentenced according to the DPRK criminal codes and criminal procedures codes. Instead, they're "forcibly disappeared" by police agencies and deported to the camps with no legal or judicial process. Only a small number of inmates are eligible for eventual release. Those who escaped to South Korea report public executions of prisoners for attempting escape or violating camp regulations, mostly unauthorized food gathering.
In addition, thousands of North Koreans are imprisoned, subjected to forced labor for both criminal and, by international standards, political offenses.
Since 2003, the UN Human Rights Council and, since 2005, the UN General Assembly, at the initiative of member states of the European Union, have passed resolutions that recognize gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. Each year, the number of UN member states voting for the DPRK human rights resolutions increases.
In response, North Korea insists that the political prison camps do not exist and that "there can be no human rights problem in their people centered socialism." North Korea refuses to meet or cooperate with officials appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Even during the height of the North Korean famine, when UN agencies were providing food aid to close to one third of North Koreans, the DPRK refused six requests to meet with the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food.
The UN Security Council has repeatedly sanctioned DPRK, but only for its nuclear weapons and missile programs. UN Security Council members have refused entreaties to take a more comprehensive approach on North Korea's human-rights debacles, including famine of the 1990s, made worse by the government's policies, and subsequent chronic, policy-driven food shortages.
Former political prisoners have now reached the sufficient critical mass in South Korea to form their own NGOs. More than 100 former prisoners and torture victims jointly articulated their grievances in December 2009, writing to the International Criminal Court, asking for an investigation into the crimes against humanity. The ICC prosecutor's office responded that, absent a referral from the UN Security Council, the crimes referred to by these petitioners were outside the ICC's jurisdiction. The prosecutor recommended that North Koreans approach other organs of the international community.
Subsequently, a coalition of some 40 international NGOs, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and other NGOs from South Korea and Japan, have joined forces with former North Korean prisoners to seek international recognition that the extreme violations of constitute crimes against humanity, thus encouraging North Korean authorities to realize that it's in their interest to close the labor camps and political prisons.
For now, despite its thumbs-up to Mickey and Minnie Mouse, new DPRK leadership avows determination to seek out and punish traitors, including family members. The only recourse for those outside North Korea is to insist that the international community make dismantlement of forced-labor prison camps a priority on par with the dismantlement of the DPRK nuclear weapons program.
