The United Nations has released a report that focuses on human rights abuses perpetrated against women in North Korea, recounting the ordeal of dozens of women at the hands of state security officers and police.

The 72-page report, released by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights simultaneously in Seoul and Geneva, details a wide range of rights abuses in North Korea, including detention in «inhumane conditions,» deprivation of food, torture, forced labor and violence, including sexual assaults.

All of the more than 100 women interviewed over a period of 10 years from 2009 reported hunger to the point of malnutrition. Many of them witnessed prison officials beating pregnant detainees so severely that they aborted their unborn child. Others saw guards rip new-born children from their mothers’ arms and kill them.

Pyongyang has categorically denied the details in the study and has in the past accused the UN of falsifying its reports on the North, charging the organization with being a tool of the United States.

The UN office was set up in Seoul in June 2015 with the specific aim of documenting human rights abuses in North Korea and, at an appropriate time in the future, of prosecuting those accused of crimes against humanity. For this new report, investigators at the office interviewed women who had fled North Korea but had been subsequently detained, primarily in China, and forcibly repatriated and punished.

Treason convictions

For defectors who spent a long time abroad before being captured, were in contact with Christian groups, or are suspected of planning to travel on to South Korea — considered a political crime — the punishments are much more severe, the report points out. Those found guilty of this form of «treason» are invariably sent to one of the North’s five «kwanliso,» or political prison camps, for an indeterminate period of time.

The women recounted being held in inhumane, overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, with little or no access to fresh air or daylight. They were repeatedly subjected to torture, beatings and individual or collective punishment for failing to complete the hard labor assigned to them.

The report calls on the North Korean government to halt its systematic abuse of women held in detention and to bring its detention system into line with international norms and standards. It also urges other states to respect the principle of not repatriating individuals who are likely to have their human rights violated and to participate in any investigations into crimes against humanity.

In conclusion, the report says the UN Human Rights Office will continue to gather evidence «to support a process of criminal accountability, wherever and whenever possible.»