The State Department’s 2017 report on human rights in North Korea.

I found this at a Wall Street Journal article about North Korea.

The State Department’s 2017 report on human rights in North Korea contains this remarkable summary: “The people of North Korea faced egregious human rights violations by the government in nearly all reporting categories including: extrajudicial killings; disappearances; arbitrary arrests and detentions; torture; political prison camps in which conditions were often harsh, life threatening, and included forced and compulsory labor; unfair trials; rigid controls over many aspects of citizen’s lives, including arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, and correspondence, and denial of the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and movement; denial of the ability to choose their government; coerced abortion; trafficking in persons; severe restrictions on worker rights, including denial of the right to organize independent unions and domestic forced labor through mass mobilizations and as a part of the re-education system.”

The report also cites cases in which the government “reportedly executed individuals for sleeping during patriotic events,” and said mothers held in detention “were in some cases reportedly forced to watch the infanticide of their newborn infants.”

The North Korean government maintains six different types of detention facilities, including camps for political prisoners. Christians reportedly receive harsher punishment if they reveal their faith.

Reports of torture persist, including cases of electric shock and confinement in “punishment cells” too small to allow standing upright or sitting down.