Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery Poverty drives the unsuspecting poor into the
hands of traffickers Published reports & articles from 2000 to 2025 gvnet.com/humantrafficking/NorthKorea.htm
The Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) is a source country for men,
women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and
commercial sexual exploitation. The most common form of trafficking involves
North Korean women and girls subjected to involuntary servitude after
willingly crossing the border into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Once in China, they
are picked up by traffickers and sold as brides to PRC nationals, often of
Korean ethnicity. In other cases, North Korean women and girls are lured out of
North Korea to escape poor economic, social, and political conditions by the
promise of food, jobs, and freedom, only to be forced into prostitution,
marriage, or exploitative labor arrangements once in China. In some cases, women
and girls may be sold to traffickers by their families or acquaintances.
Women sold as brides are sometimes re-abducted by the traffickers or are sold
by husbands who no longer want them. In some cases, North Korean women are
sold multiple times to different men by the same trafficker. Many victims of
trafficking, unable to speak Chinese, are held as virtual prisoners. The
illegal status of North Koreans in the PRC and other Southeast Asian
countries increases their vulnerability to trafficking for purposes of forced
labor and sexual exploitation. - U.S.
State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June,
2009 Check out a later country report here and possibly a full TIP Report here |
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CAUTION: The following
links have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in the
DPRK. Some of these links may lead to
websites that present allegations that are unsubstantiated or even
false. No attempt has been made to
verify their authenticity or to validate their content. HOW TO USE THIS WEB-PAGE Students If you are looking for
material to use in a term-paper, you are advised to scan the postings on this
page and others to see which aspects of Human Trafficking are of particular
interest to you. Would you like to
write about Forced-Labor? Debt
Bondage? Prostitution? Forced Begging? Child Soldiers? Sale of Organs? etc. On the other
hand, you might choose to include precursors of trafficking such as poverty and hunger. There is a lot to
the subject of Trafficking. Scan other
countries as well. Draw comparisons
between activity in adjacent countries and/or regions. Meanwhile, check out some of the Term-Paper resources
that are available on-line. Teachers Check out some of
the Resources
for Teachers attached to this website. ***
FEATURED ARTICLES *** An Auschwitz In
Korea Jeff Jacoby, The
Boston Globe, February 8, 2004 www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/02/08/an_auschwitz_in_korea/ [accessed 29 August
2011] Nor is it breaking
news that North Korea operates a vicious prison gulag -- "not unlike the
worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century," as NBC
News reported more than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are
held in these slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of others have
perished in them over the years. Some of the camps are so hellish that 20
percent or more of their prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The
dead can be of any age: North Korea's longstanding policy is to imprison not
only those accused of such "crimes" as practicing Christianity or
complaining about North Korean life, but their entire families, grandparents
and grandchildren included. Human Trafficking
Thrives Across N.Korea-China Border The Chosun Ilbo, 03
Mar 2008 www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/MMAH-7CE5ZU?OpenDocument [accessed 14
December 2010] A 26-year-old North
Korean woman, Mun Yun-hee crossed the Duman (or Tumen) River into China in
the dawn of Oct. 22 last year, which at that point was some 40 m wide, guided
by a human trafficker. She was being sold to a single middle-aged Chinese
farmer into a kind of indentured servitude-cum-companionship. Both of them
wore only panties, having stored their trousers and shoes in bags, because if
you are found wearing wet clothes across the river deep at night, it is a
dead giveaway that you are a North Korean refugee. Mun was led to a hideout,
and the agent left. Asked why she crossed the river, she replied, "My
father starved to death late in the 1990s, and my mother is blind from
hunger." Her family owed 300 kg of corns, beans and rice and sold
herself for the sake of her blind mother and a younger brother. The middleman
paid her 350 yuan, or W46,000 (US$1=W939), equivalent to half of the grain
debt. ***
ARCHIVES *** Examining Human
Trafficking In North Korea Mckenzie Staley, The Borgen Project, 1 December2020 borgenproject.org/human-trafficking-in-north-korea/ [accessed 23
February 2021] CHILD EXPLOITATION: The North Korean
government is paying schools for child labor while the children are under
their care. Teachers and school principals exploit students for personal
gain. The effects of child exploitation can cause physical and psychological
injuries, malnutrition, exhaustion and growth deficiencies. U.S. human
trafficking report: China, Iran, N. Korea worst offenders Nicholas Sakelaris,
United Press International UPI, 20 June 2019 [accessed 20 June
2019] U.S. Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo said Thursday human trafficking is a strain on humanity
that violates basic human rights. He named China, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba among the worst offenders. Those countries all
scored the lowest on the 2019 Trafficking in Person report released by the
U.S. State Department. 2020 Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices: Democratic People's Republic of Korea U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor, 30 March 2021 www.state.gov/reports/2020-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/
north-korea/ [accessed 20 June
2021] PROHIBITION OF
FORCED OR COMPULSORY LABOR Forced labor
continued to take place in the brick making, cement manufacturing, coal
mining, gold mining, logging, iron production, agriculture, and textile
industries. The Walk Free Foundation, in its 2018 Global Slavery Index,
estimated that one of every 10 individuals, or approximately 2.6 million
persons, in the country were in situations of modern slavery. According to Open
North Korea’s report Sweatshop North Korea, 16- or 17-year-old individuals
from the low-loyalty class were assigned to 10 years of forced labor in
military-style construction youth brigades. One worker reportedly earned a
mere 120 won (less than $0.15) per month. During a 200-day labor mobilization
campaign in 2016, for example, these young workers worked as many as 17 hours
per day. State media boasted that the laborers worked in subzero
temperatures. One laborer reported conditions were so dangerous while
building an apartment building that at least one person died each time a
floor was added. Loyalty class status also determines lifelong job
assignments, with the lowest classes relegated to dangerous mines The vast majority
of North Koreans employed outside the DPRK were located in Russia and China.
… Laborers worked between 12 and 16
hours per day, and sometimes up to 20 hours per day, with only one or two
rest days per month … in most cases employing firms paid salaries directly to
the government, which took between 70 percent and 90 percent of the total
earnings, leaving approximately 90,000 won ($100) per month for worker
take-home pay.. PROHIBITION OF CHILD
LABOR AND MINIMUM AGE FOR EMPLOYMENT Children ages 16
and 17 were enrolled in military-style youth construction brigades for
10-year periods and subjected to long working hours and hazardous work.
Students suffered from physical and psychological injuries, malnutrition,
exhaustion, and growth deficiencies as a result of required forced labor.. Freedom House
Country Report 2020 Edition freedomhouse.org/country/north-korea/freedom-world/2020 [accessed 4 May 2020] G4. DO INDIVIDUALS
ENJOY EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND FREEDOM FROM ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION? Human trafficking
networks, sometimes operating with the assistance of government officials,
target North Korean women; those ensnared by this activity are subject to sex
slavery and forced marriages, often in neighboring China. North Korea turning
to human trafficking for foreign currency Holly LaFon, Medill News Service, 18 May 2015 www.marketwatch.com/story/north-korea-turning-to-human-trafficking-for-foreign-currency-2015-05-18 [accessed 18 May
2015] North Korea,
frequently ranked as the world’s worst human rights abuser,
has lured between 50,000 and 60,000 citizens to work in industries around the
globe with the promise they would keep their wages, according to a paper from
the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights presented on Tuesday.
Instead, the wages are sent to the North Korean government, generating as
much as $2.3 billion per year. Industries
employing the laborers range from logging and mining to restaurants, and
workers who complain or escape risk reprisal against themselves and their
families who remain in North Korea, said Robert King, special envoy for North
Korea Human Rights Issues at the State Department, at the House hearing. Workers have been
sent through bilateral contracts to around 40 countries, primarily Russia,
China, Mongolia and nations in Africa, central Europe and the Middle East,
according to a State Department Trafficking in Persons Report from March. NK Defectors
Describe Horrors of Human Trafficking The Dong-A ILBO, MAY
01, 2009 english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=060000&biid=2009050137348 [accessed 14
December 2010] Bang Mi-sun, who came to the South in 2004, spoke first. She
said she fled the North to feed her two children after her husband starved to
death in 2002. “I thought that if I went to China, I could
eat heartily and lead a better life than in North Korea. What waited for me
was a wretched life,” she said. “I
was sold to a disabled Chinese man for 585 dollars at a human trafficking
market and resold to another man.” Bang was caught by
Chinese police and repatriated to North Korea. There, she was subjected to
severe corporal punishment and forced labor.
“I was put in a detention camp and flogged. I was battered so badly
that I cannot walk well now,” she said. Human Trafficking
In North Korea Voice of America VOA
News, 9 August 2012 editorials.voa.gov/content/a-41-2008-03-14-voa4-84655987/1481324.html [accessed 30 August
2012] Conditions inside
North Korea are dire. They include a severe food shortage, a lack of basic
freedoms and a system of political repression that includes a network of
government-operated prison camps. The approximately two-hundred thousand
prisoners in these camps are subjected to reeducation and slave-like
conditions. US lashes out at
NKorea's "horrendous" human rights record Agence France-Presse
AFP, WASHINGTON, Oct 31, 2007 www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refdaily?pass=463ef21123&id=472983ef8 [accessed 1
September 2014] Tens of thousands
of North Koreans, fleeing hunger or repression at home, have travelled across
the border to China in recent years.
But China has an agreement with its close ally to repatriate them as
economic migrants, a policy strongly criticized by refugee aid and human rights
groups. Returnees can face harsh
punishment including jail terms and forced labour and even death, according
to rights groups. North Korean women
crossing the border into China are generally "most vulnerable" to
trafficking given their illegal status in China and their inability to return
home, he said. Amnesty International
said it had documented cases of North Korean women being lured from their
homes and trafficked as "sex slaves" into China, where they are
sold as brides in forced marriages. Victims of Human
Trafficking Speak The Dong-A ILBO,
December 15, 2006 english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=040000&biid=2006121564548 [accessed 14
December 2010] WOMEN WHO ARE SOLD
INTO SLAVERY
- Ms. G (age: 26), a former nurse from the North who made it across the
border to China in February was appalled after she was sold to a family. She
was the only woman in the house with 62-year-old father, 32 year-old oldest
son and other three men. Her worst fears turned into reality when the father
and four sons each demanded her to share their bed every night. She was
forced to go through this ordeal, even when she was sick or had her period.
She did not have anyone to turn to, because there was not even a village
nearby. She put up with this life for about eight months. North Korea
exporting workers into lives of slavery Barbara Demick, Los
Angeles Times, ZELEZNA, Czech Republic, December 28, 2005 seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002707584_koreans28.html [accessed 14
December 2010] www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/north-korea-exporting-workers-into-lives-of-slavery/ [accessed 26
September 2016] GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT - Almost the
entire monthly salaries of the women here, about $260, the Czech minimum
wage, are deposited directly in an account controlled by the North Korean
government, which gives them only a fraction of the money. To the extent that they are allowed outside
in this village 20 miles west of Prague, they go only in groups. The refugees forced
to be sex slaves in China Richard Spencer in
Seoul, The Telegraph, 01 Oct 2005 [accessed 14 December
2010] The women who flee
North Korea believe nothing could be worse than their dictatorship's famine
and labor camps. But many change their
minds after they cross the Tumen River into the "safety" of China,
smuggled by middlemen who promise safe passage. "I was locked into a house and raped
every night," said Kim Chun-ae, a matronly 51-year-old. "My teenage
daughter was sold three times by traffickers. She was 'recycled'." Why North Korea
Deported Me Norbert Vollertsen,
Front Page Magazine, June 15, 2005 www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1423544/posts?page=1 [accessed 14
December 2010] Most of the
patients in the hospitals suffer from psychosomatic illnesses. They’re worn
out by compulsory drills, innumerable parades, mandatory assemblies beginning
at the crack of dawn, and constant, droning propaganda. They are tired and at
the end of their tether. Clinical depression is rampant. Alcoholism is
common. Young adults have no hope, no future. Everywhere you look, people are
beset by anxiety. North Korea's
horrors cannot be tolerated Editorial, The San
Diego Union-Tribune, May 15, 2005 www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050515/news_lz1ed15top.html [accessed 1 September
2014] legacy.sandiegouniontribune.com/uniontrib/20050515/news_lz1ed15top.html [accessed 26
September 2016] By the best
estimates, between 2 million and 3 million North Koreans starved to death
during the 1990s. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have been confined
in a network of brutal forced-labor camps. The world now has sufficient
eyewitness accounts and other documentary evidence to conclude beyond any
doubt that these camps are the scenes of horrific crimes – summary execution,
torture, privation and abuse on a hideous scale, forced abortions and
infanticide, and more. The Hidden Gulag:
Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps Report, Jul 5, 2003 www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/The_Hidden_Gulag.pdf [accessed 4 February
2016] EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
- This 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, often in remote valleys located in the mountainous areas of
North Korea; 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 the DPRK. Worse Than 1984 -
North Korea, slave state Christopher
Hitchens, Slate Magazine, May 2, 2005 [accessed 14
December 2010] In North Korea,
every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with
hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can
assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private
life has been entirely abolished. The Democidal Famine In North Korea R.J. Rummel,
OrthodoxyToday -- Sources: Many of the specifics were taken from a report by
Seong Ho Jhe, published in "Korea and World Affairs" (Summer 2003) orthodoxytoday.org/articles4/RummelKorea.php [accessed 14
December 2010] [scroll down] This is not all. In
this "classless" communist society, the regime has divided North
Koreans into a rigid hierarchy of three classes, and fifty-one subdivisions,
depending on a person's status within the communist North Korean Workers
Party and the military, their perceived faithfulness to communism, and family
backgrounds. In other words, Kim uses the very food people need to live as a
tool to reward and punish his subject slaves. Thus, vast numbers of people
whose loyalties are questioned or may be deemed useless to the regime do not
receive enough food to live long. The worst off are those people and families
incarcerated in Kim's concentration or forced labor camps. They receive the
lowest food allowance of all, in spite of their being forced to work from 5
am to 8 pm. Escaping North
Korea Sarah Buckley, BBC
News Online, 28 July 2004 news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3932591.stm [accessed 14
December 2010] ILLEGAL WORK - They seek work -
perhaps in mines, factories or cattle farms - but are often swindled out of
their earnings. A mine owner might
promise them 500 yuan a month, but actually they are paid less than half, or
nothing at all - forced into acquiescence by the fear of being reported to
the authorities. the horrifying
situation in North Korea Al-Muhajabah,
Islamic Blogs, January 30, 2003 www.fullyveiledgeek.com/2003/01/the-horrifying-situation-in-north-korea.html [accessed 1
September 2014] I've been reading
about the gulags of North Korea, in which an estimated 400,000 people have
died since 1972. Up to 200,000 people are still imprisoned there today,
according to this report. When a person is accused of a political crime, they
and their family are sent to the camps. There is also a policy of infanticide
and forced abortions in the prison camps. Grim fate for N.
Korean prisoners Mike Chinoy, Cable
News Network CNN, TOKYO, October 31, 2003 www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/10/30/nkorea.political.prisons/index.html [accessed 14
December 2010] Hidden in the
valleys between high mountains in the northern provinces of North Korea lies
one of the country's darkest secrets -- political penal labor prisons. Behind the walls of
a Kwan-li-so conditions and treatment are brutal. "People are starved to death, worked
to death, frozen to death over a period of time, and it's just absolutely
horrific, reminiscent of what we've read coming out of the old Gulags under
Stalin," says Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback. Along with political prisoners, up to three
generations of their families also are banished without trial -- usually for
lifetime sentences in a system of "guilt by association," the
report finds. Opening a Window on
North Korea's Horrors Doug Struck (with
Special correspondent Joohee Cho), Washington Post Foreign Service; Page A01,
Seoul, October 4, 2003 brainstorming.typepad.com/brainstorming/2003/10/opening_a_windo.html [accessed 1
September 2014] [accessed 11
February 2018] Han, a Communist
Party official in North Korea, was walking home from work when he heard he
was in trouble. He had smuggled a radio back from China after an official
trip. He listened to it late at night, huddled with earphones on and shades
drawn, to hear music that brought him a whisper of sanity and took him away
from the horrors of his day. Now,
someone had found it, or someone had told. If a farmer or
laborer had a radio, he could have been released," Han said. "But I
was an official. In my case, it would have been torture and a life sentence
in a political prisoners' camp." Why North Korea is
No. 1
Christopher
Hitchens, Newsweek International, July 8, 2001 www.newsweek.com/why-north-korea-number-one-154827 [accessed 4 February
2016] It's the
totalitarian aspect that strikes you first, as it did me when I visited North
Korea last winter. Fifty years of ultra-Stalinism have made the very idea of
a private life almost unthinkable. Every move and utterance is planned and
scripted, with an entire people endlessly mobilized for a cult of hysterical
adulation. The president of the country is a dead man named Kim Il Sung,
whose rotund visage glares from every wall. All other official leadership
posts are held by his son Kim Jong Il, whose birth is said to have been
attended by miraculous signs and portents. All films, all books, all
newspapers and all radio and television broadcasts are about either the
Father or the Son. Everybody is a soldier. Everybody is an informer.
Everybody is a unit. Everything is propaganda. A Prison Country Dr. Norbert
Vollertsen, Opinion Journal, April 17, 2001 faculty.piercecollege.edu/chartrfj/Articles and UN and Iraq and 9 11 Korea/LIFE
UNDER THE RED STAR.doc [accessed 9
September 2011] www.wsj.com/articles/SB987465779716104579 [accessed 20
February 2019] Human rights are
nonexistent. Peasants, slaves to the regime, lead lives of utter destitution.
It is as if a basic right to exist--to be--is denied. Ordinary people starve
and die. They are detained at the caprice of the regime. Forced labor is the
basic way in which "order" is maintained. Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child, 4 June 2004 www1.umn.edu/humanrts/crc/korea2004.html [accessed 14
December 2010] [62] The Committee
notes the lack of information in the State party report on human trafficking,
in particular, involving children. ***
EARLIER EDITIONS OF SOME OF THE ABOVE *** Freedom House
Country Report - Political Rights: 7 Civil Liberties: 7 Status: Not Free 2018 Edition freedomhouse.org/country/north-korea/freedom-world/2018 [accessed 4 May 2020] G4. DO INDIVIDUALS
ENJOY EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND FREEDOM FROM ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION? Forced labor is
common in prison camps, mass mobilization programs, and state-run contracting
arrangements in which North Korean workers are sent abroad. There have been
widespread reports of trafficked women and girls among the tens of thousands
of North Koreans who have crossed into China. Due to changing economic
conditions, prostitution has reportedly become common in North Korea itself
in recent years. Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor, March 8, 2006 2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61612.htm [accessed 10
February 2020] TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS
– There were no known laws specifically addressing the problem of trafficking
in persons, and trafficking of women and young girls into and within China
continued to be widely reported. Some women and girls were sold by their
families or by kidnappers as wives or concubines to men in China; others fled
of their own volition to escape starvation and deprivation. A network of
smugglers reportedly facilitated this trafficking. According to defector
reports, many victims of trafficking, unable to speak Chinese, were held as
virtual prisoners, and some were forced to work as prostitutes. All
material used herein reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107
for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use. PLEASE RESPECT COPYRIGHTS OF COMPONENT
ARTICLES. Cite this
webpage as: Patt, Prof. Martin, "Human Trafficking & Modern-day
Slavery – DPRK (North Korea)",
http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/NorthKorea.htm, [accessed <date>] |
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