Sino-NK

So Se-pyong, permanent representative of the DPRK UN Office in Geneva, speaks to the Human Rights Council as a UN Commission of Inquiry in 2014 finds North Korea culpable for “crimes against humanity” in 2014. | Image: UN Photo/Jean Marc Ferré.

North Korea remains the subject of serious human rights allegations. In 2014, a special United Nations Commission of Inquiry found the country responsible for “crimes against humanity”, in part for its network of political prison camps. Despite overwhelming evidence including witness testimony and satellite imagery, the DPRK government has continued to deny the existence of camps for political prisoners.

As a result, North Korean-produced data on political prisoners remains exceedingly rare, and analyses of such information rarer still. Sino-NK recently gained access to one of the few documents produced by North Korea to tally political prisoner numbers, via a file stored in the archives of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Maryland.

Dated June of 1947, the year before the DPRK became a sovereign state, the document is simply entitled “Statistics on Political Prisoners” for South Pyongan province, which at the time included the North Korean capital Pyongyang.[1] The file contains the seal of South Pyongan Procurator, Kim Sung-bom, from whose office it was seized by American troops on 1 November 1950, shortly after UN forces captured the city during their ill-fated drive to the Chinese border during the early stages of the Korean War. North Korea’s government and military, including leader Kim Il-sung, had fled the city the previous month, leaving behind a trove of papers, publications and documents.

This particular file offers an astonishing insight into who exactly North Korea considered its political enemies of the era, and how it processed their incarceration, and related information. The file is arranged as a series of grids by category of political offence: “reactionary”; “treason”; “assassination and arson”; “illegal possession of leaflets and agitation”; and finally “pro-Japanese”. Just two years after the Korean peninsula claimed independence from Japan, the act of collaboration was at the time considered a crime in both the northern and southern sectors of the peninsula.

Overall, the document tallies 166 political prisoners being processed through the provincial office of the procurator in June, 1947, of whom 56 detainees related to cases carried over from the previous month. The document therefore indicates a sharp increase in the number of political arrests in June compared to May of 1957 – 110 new cases, with just half this number the previous month. However, the absence of additional data means it remains impossible to infer a longer-term trend. The document thus offers a snapshot of political prisoner numbers in the North Korean capital and surrounding province for the period, rather than a comprehensive data profile of such cases.

By far the highest volume of detainees were classified under the category of “reactionaries”, representing 132 of 166 people in detention at that time. No “assassination or arson” cases were recorded, and there was only one “pro-Japanese” detainee noted in the document. Of the remaining political detainees, 22 were held for “illegal possession of leaflets and agitation”, with 11 incarcerated on unspecified “treason” charges.

The document includes data on the status of these cases. Of the 166 political prisoners, 109 were recorded to have been successfully prosecuted, with 41 pending, and a small but lucky minority of just 16 cases dismissed. The numbers yield a rough conviction rate of just over 87 percent – albeit from a very small data snapshot.

As historian Suzy Kim described in her use of RG242 documents in Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950, these archival documents also contain detailed data on political party, religion, and social-professional status on the individuals in North Korea’s then new, Soviet-controlled society.[2] Political prisoners in the 1947 document mostly had no party affiliation at all. Of the 166 detainees, only 30 were members of a political party, and of these seven were of the Labour of Workers’ Party, the precursor of the Korean Worker’s Party (KWP) which rules the country today. Clearly Party membership did not always help an individual avoid arrest on political charges in the north. Of the remaining detained party members, 19 were of the Democratic Party, which at the time was in the process of being co-opted into the Worker’s Party after its original leader, Cho Man-sik, had been detained in 1946 – thereby becoming north Korea’s first, high-profile political prisoner.

In terms of religious affiliation, only 10 of the 166 recorded detainees were considered Christians, and 15 adherents of Cheondoism, a native Korean faith which originated in the 19th Century in part due to encroaching Western influence in the late Joseon period.

Young petit-bourgeoisie make up the vast majority of detainees in terms of social status, with some 50 in number from this category in their 20s, and a further 33 students of the same age.

Otherwise, the document gives no indication as the punishment meted out to those found guilty, nor of the judicial processes under which they were subject. Thus far, we have not become aware of any additional files on political prisoner numbers in North Korea for this period, pending further research of what remains an under-utilised resource at RG242 in relation to the DPRK.

In 1947, the period covered by the file, North Korea remained under the control of Stalin’s Soviet Union which had, nearly two decades earlier, began operation of its formalised Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey, or Gulag network. In North Korea, a similar system would not be adopted by Kim Il-sung and his regime until the Cabinet of Ministers instructed its creation in January, 1959.[3] As noted by the Seoul-based academic Fyodor Tertitskiy, the North Korean concentration camps differed from Gulags, and were more similar to Stalin’s settlements for people sentenced to exile. In North Korea, these were termed ‘centres for administration of re-settlers’, which housed political inmates sentenced not by a court but a local Security Committee by which “the entire family shares their fate”.[4]

Hidden Prison Camps

An image of the Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda taken from the landmark Amnesty International report on his incarceration in the DPRK, published in 1979. | Image: Amnesty International.

North Korea’s prison camp system did not become widely known outside of governments, notably those of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, until the late 1970s when Amnesty International released the detailed testimony of Ali Lameda, a Venezuelan poet detained in a camp in Sariwon. Lameda had moved to Pyongyang in the 1960s to work as a Spanish translator for the Foreign Languages Publishing House which produced North Korean propaganda sent to Latin American countries, and across the globe. After quietly criticising the regime under Kim Il-sung, Lameda was soon detained, interrogated and transferred to a prison camp, spending seven years in detention in North Korea prior to his release in 1974. At the time, his testimony represented among the most detailed on North Korean prison camps, as shown by this excerpt:

There were some 6,000 or more people held at the camp, according to information gleaned from the guards or orderlies. Some of the guards and orderlies would communicate with the prisoners. Apparently, the camp was a huge circular place, with an enormous courtyard…. The prisoners were forced to work for 12 hours a day, mechanical work, making jeeps for example, which was, of course, unpaid. There was no agricultural work done at this camp. But outside the camp there were several farms worked by political prisoners.

In 2003, the release of The Hidden Gulag, produced and updated by the rights investigator David Hawk for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) in Washington DC, combined satellite imagery with witness testimony to detail the network of North Korea’s kwanliso (관리소), literally ‘control facilities’, thereby further expanding understanding of the country’s prison camp system.

As with the case of Lameda, the DPRK government made no public pronouncements on the mounting evidence which demonstrated the existence of a large, separate population of prisoners held on political crimes. Therefore, the NARA file from 1947 remains among the few official North Korean accounts or references currently known. However, in 2019 and 2025, North Korea made what amounted to partial acknowledgement of its political prisoner population.

Prior to 2006, the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR) produced documentation on political prisoners in the country, but the mechanism did not require the DPRK to respond. Following the creation of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, this situation changed, and every UN member state was then required to undergo a human rights review on a regular cycle using the same framework, an attempt to eliminate accusations of bias or selective review.

In late 2009, North Korea received its own review, leading to its first-ever national human rights report, and an appearance by North Korean diplomats at the UN to present their findings and respond to questions from other states. In its initial review that year, North Korea made a vehement denial when questioned about political detainees and prison camps.

In 2014, a UN Commission of Inquiry condemned North Korea for “crimes against humanity” for its human rights record, in part for its system of detaining political prisoners in camps, leading once again to familiar denials from DPRK delegates at the UN.

Partial Disclosure

Only in 2019, did North Korea’s language start to change. The same year, as part of its third review under the Human Rights Council, North Korea stated:

The Criminal Law and the Criminal Procedure Law did not contain terms such as “political prisoner” or “political prison camps”. Those laws stated that those who had committed offences against the State or other ordinary crimes should be committed to reform institutions.

Although the DPRK employed semantics to reject the term ‘political prisoners’, it nonetheless had made a rare admission that it imprisoned individuals on anti-state crimes, an explanation it expanded in its latest rights review at the end of 2024, acknowledging for the first time that anti-state criminals in the country are kept separately from ordinary prisoners, as follows:

There were no political prisoners or political prison camps in the vocabulary of the Criminal Law or the Criminal Procedure Law. The laws used only terms such as criminals who committed anti-State offences and reform institutions. Those who committed anti-State crimes as provided in the Criminal Law were spies and terrorists who were sent by hostile forces. Such prisoners were kept separately from ordinary prisoners. (Bold added by author)

Furthermore, North Korea acknowledged issuing the death penalty for those who “had committed crimes against the state…. The death penalty was carried out behind closed doors, at a designated place”.

These admissions, however small, equate to partial acknowledgement by North Korea in relation to its political prisoner population, and in turn represent rare official information from the country itself on this issue. The office of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK, Elizabeth Salmón Gárate, told Sino-NK: “It is significant that the DPRK admits that those who committed political crimes are detained separately.”

Although North Korea acknowledged holding anti-state prisoners, it did not respond to evidence compiled by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights which “showed the continued operation of at least four political prison camps” in the DPRK. Will the government further expand acknowledgement of its political prisoner population during its next UN rights review at the end of this decade?

Thus far, the slight adjustment in North Korean explanations to the UN remain the closest the country has come to confirming its political prisoner population and related camp system. The 1947 archival file at NARA is therefore part of what remains a sparse official record, whether voluntarily released or not, and points to the origins of a political prison system responsible for among the most prevalent, longstanding human rights abuses perpetuated by any state in the post-World War II era.

---

[1] “Statistics on Political Prisoners,” National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, MD, Record Group (RG) 242 (National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized), 201208, Box 42, Item 6.

[2] Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

[3] Fyodor Tertitskiy, Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 192–93.

[4] Ibid.