WASHINGTON, Oct 22 Kyodo North Ko...

WASHINGTON, Oct 22 Kyodo

North Korea has six or seven ''political penal-labor colonies'' with 150000 to 200000 commonalty imprisoned without any judicial proces for lifetime judgments of slave labor, a U human rights organization said Wednesday.

A larger number of toward the south Koreans, including many fishermen, who were captured or abducted by dint of North Korea over the years, and a smaller number of Japanese citizens who were abducted from Japan through North Korea are also believed to have been placed in the prison connected view the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea said in a report.

as it is large-scale political forced-labor camps are located for the greatest part in the valleys between high mountains in the northern provinces of North Korea, with 5000 to 50000 folks imprisoned per camp, said the report titled ''The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps.''

The 120-page report was compiled by means of David Hawk, who directed the Cambodia Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1996 and 1997 after investigating the Cambodian genocide (1975-1978) in the early and mid-1980s.

It depicts details of the North Korean prison camps with testimonies by the agency of former North Korean prisoners who failinged to South Korea and commercial satellite photographs of like facilities.

The report said the most numerous strikingly abnormal feature of the prison camp connected view is the philosophy of ''collective responsibility'' or ''guilt according to association,'' whereby the mother and father, sisters and brothers, children and sometimes grandchildren of the offending political prisoner are imprisoned in a ''three-generation practice.''

The political penal-labor camps are usually encompassed at their perimeters through barbed-wire fences punctuated with guard towers and patrolled on heavily armed guards, the report said.

Many of them involve slave labor, which is ''often performed 12 or more hours for day, seven days per week,'' in mining for coal, logging and wood-cutting in the adjacent mountains below ''below-subsistence food rations,'' the report said.

The harsh conditions lead to large numbers of deaths in detention, and bodily forms who try to escape and other major rule-breakers are publicly execut through hanging or firing squad in fore-rank of other prisoners, it said.

In addition to like political penal-labor colonies, North Korea also has a series of smaller penal-labor facilities for prisoners who are subdue to a judicial process and given fixed-term decisions the report said.

The majority of these prisoners are imprisoned because they have been convicted of what would be in any society gross offence crimes, but some prisoners are ''political'' in that they are convicted for actions that would not be normally criminalized, it said.

undivided woman interviewed for the report, for example, described being convicted of disturbing the ''socialist order'' for singing a southern Korean pop song in a private home

Another woman imprisoned in this stamp of facility from the late 1980 and to the early 1990 testified that other prisoners at the time of her imprisonment included about 250 Korean women who had voluntarily repatriated from Japan in November 1987

The report also said North Korea has a series of detention facilities in areas along the North Korea-China border to interrogate and punish North Koreans forcibly repatriated from China.

parts interviewed for the report said North Korean women who were pregnant when repatriated were subsequently bring under ruleed to forced abortions, or if the pregnancy was too advanced, were allowed to deliver their babies and nothing else to have them killed immediately after birth.

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