The 125-page report, titled "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps," reveals through testimonies from about 30 North Korean defectors that the North has extensive concentration camps, such as the "Education Camp," or regular prison, and the "Management Camp," or political criminal camp. It also describes camps that were unknown until recently, including the "Concentration Center" and "Labor Training Camp."

According to the report, the Concentration Center is where migrants repatriated from China are temporarily housed and punished. There, they are investigated and divided into groups. The Labor Training Camp is where defectors with minor offenses or citizens who are discontented are put to forced labor for three months to one year.

The report analyzed and compared the defectors’ testimonies with pictures of North Korean concentration camps. The images were provided by two U.S. companies, DigitalGlobe and Space Imaging. The report reveals in detail the uses of the concentration camps according to building. Until now, only a few pictures of political camps in Hoiryeong and Yodeok had been shown in South Korea.

The report was written by David Hawk, an American human rights investigator who spent a decade chronicling Cambodia's genocide, and was commissioned by the privately-run U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. It deals with violation of human rights on an extensive level, including forced labor, torture and assaults.

The committee urged that the concentration camps be revealed and dismantled according to the UN Human Rights Commission’s resolutions against North Korea in 2001 and 2003. They also said that human rights issues must not be left out of talks between South and North Korea and that international efforts must be supported by the resolutions. The committee strongly urged the Chinese government to stop repatriating defectors back to North Korea, and asked permission for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to operate in China.

The committee said that North Korean human rights issues must be brought up in negotiations regarding other security and nuclear issues and requested that conditions be attached, such as improvements in prison conditions, release of political criminals and permission for North Korean citizens to leave the country. Both the New York Times and Washington Post released related articles that are expected to boost awareness in the United States of the North's human rights abuses.

Anne Applebaum, who wrote the introduction for the report, wrote a column titled "See No Evil, Stop No Evil" in the Wednesday issue of the Washington Post, claiming that the violation of human rights in North Korean concentration camps must not be covered up. Applebaum said that everyone was trying to conceal North Korea’s human rights problems; China because it has its own concentration camps, South Korea "for fear of harming whatever mildly improved relations it has with the North" and the United States and Japan because they believe this problem cannot be solved unless North Korea gives up its existing political basis first. (Joo Yong-jung, midway@chosun.com )