Kwalliso | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

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.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (5)

Human rights in North Korea

The human rights record of North Korea is often considered to be the worst in the world and has been globally condemned, with the United Nations, the European Union and groups such as Human Rights Watch all critical of it. Most international human rights organizations consider North Korea to have no contemporary parallel with respect to violations of liberty. Western human rights groups such as Amnesty International and nations such as the United States have asserted that, in practice, there is no right to free speech, and the only media providers that are deemed legal are those operated by the government in North Korea.

Labor camp

A labor camp (or labour camp, see spelling differences) or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons (especially prison farms). Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, abolished camps of forced labor.

Forced labour

Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families. Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, penal labour and the corresponding institutions, such as debt slavery, serfdom, corvée and labour camps.