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Concept
Kwalliso
Summary
North Korea's political penal labor and rehabilitation colonies, transliterated kwalliso or kwan-ri-so, constitute one of three forms of political imprisonment in the country, the other two being what Washington DC based NGO Committee for Human Rights in North Korea described as "short-term detention/forced-labor centers" and "long-term prison labor camps", for misdemeanor and felony offenses respectively. It is unknown if there are any operating as of 2023.
Durations of imprisonment are variable. However, many are condemned to labor for life. Forced labor duties within kwalliso typically include work in mines (known examples including coal, gold, and iron ore), tree felling, timber cutting, or agricultural duties. Furthermore, camps contain state run prison farms and furniture manufacturing.
Estimates suggest that at the start of 2007, a total of six kwalliso camps were operating within the country. Despite fourteen kwalliso camps originally operating within North Korea, these later merged or were closed following the reallocation of prisoners. Kwalliso gained yet more international attention when Otto Warmbier, an American college student, was jailed in a kwalliso and died very shortly after release.
In January 1979, a report was released by Amnesty International detailing the harrowing story of Ali Lameda, a Venezuelan poet imprisoned in North Korea. He had been arrested in 1967, held for a year without trial, placed on house arrest, then incarcerated again for six years, a portion of his twenty-year sentence. It was the first-ever report on human rights in North Korea. Yet this international awareness did not indicate something new, for long before this report was compiled, individuals had been systematically imprisoned for political crimes in North Korea for decades.
While penal labour and political imprisonment are common worldwide practice, including in the United States, North Korea's use is pervasive in Western media. Red Scare phrasing such as “gulag” is often used in discussing North Korea's prison system and often compared to practices from Stalin's USSR and Mao's China.
Official source
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