The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has officially acknowledged the widespread human rights violations that regularly occur in North Korea. The following italicized section is a direct quote from the United Nation's Human Rights Resolution 2005/11 referring specifically to occurrences in North Korea:
*Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, public executions, extrajudicial and arbitrary detention, the absence of due process and the rule of law, imposition of the death penalty for political reasons, the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labour;
*Sanctions on citizens of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea who have been repatriated from abroad, such as treating their departure as treason leading to punishments of internment, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or the death penalty;
*All-pervasive and severe restrictions on the freedoms of thought, conscience, religion, opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association and on access of everyone to information, and limitations imposed on every person who wishes to move freely within the country and travel abroad;
*Continued violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of women, in particular the trafficking of women for prostitution or forced marriage, ethnically motivated forced abortions, including by labour inducing injection or natural delivery, as well as infanticide of children of repatriated mothers, including in police detention centres and labour training camps;
Mrs. Sun-Ok Lee survived a five years sentence in a North Korean concentration camp and finally succeeded to flee the DPRK. Her testimony [5] is very detailed and unbelievably cruel, but she is very trustworthy and her report is consistent with many other reports [6].
A recent BBC documentary [7] also reported that in one of these camps, North Korea tests chemical weapons on prisoners in a gas chamber:
'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'
Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.' [8]
North Korea is accused of severely restricting most freedoms, including freedom of speech and freedom of movement, both inside the country and abroad. Most infamously the DPRK employs concentration camps (video link). These camps are believed to hold as many as 200,000 inmates, including children whose only crime is having so-called "class enemies" for parents - not to mention entire families of up to three generations. Pregnant woman who gave birth inside these camps either have forced abortions or, once the child is born, it is brutally murdered by the guards by kicking it around with spiky boots, in the name of preventing the birth of a new generation of dissidents [3] [4]. However, this could not be verified, as the DPRK government simply denies, but never allowed independent human rights observers to investigate.