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Kwanliso

Concentration camps in North Korea

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Through Amnesty International, China and Soviet Union

They constitute one of three forms of political imprisonment in the country, the other two are "short-term detention/forced-labor centers" and "long-term prison labor camps", for misdemeanor and felony offenses respectively, according to the US-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. As of 2026 there are at least four kwanliso facilities in operation, with the largest being Hwasong.

Durations of imprisonment are variable. However, many prisoners are sentenced to hard labor for their whole lives. Forced labor duties within kwanliso typically include work in mines (known examples of such work include coal, gold, and iron ore mining), tree felling, timber cutting, or agricultural duties. Furthermore, camps contain state run prison farms and furniture manufacturing centers.

Estimates suggest that at the start of 2007, a total of six kwanliso camps were operating within the country. Despite fourteen kwanliso camps originally operating within North Korea, these later merged or were closed following the reallocation of prisoners.

Origins and development

Historical emergence and conceptualization

In January 1979, a report was released by Amnesty International detailing the story of Alí 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.

Stalinist and Maoist influences

From its inception, North Korea has maintained a complex relationship with Russia and China. Immediately after the end of the Korean War (1953), North Korea and Kim Il Sung looked to the Soviet Union and China for both economic and military support. Prior to the great split between the Soviet Union and China in the early 1960s, Kim visited both Moscow and Beijing often, but the split created enormous problems for Kim, who struggled to keep on good terms with both of them. To a large extent, he owed his career as well as his country's well-being to the Soviet Union and China, yet he was always wary of their dominant power. But the Sino-Soviet dispute also gave Kim Il Sung ample space to maneuver between the two great powers of communism, each of which was forced to tolerate his independence for fear of pushing him decisively to the opposite camp.

While according to North Korean propaganda, Kim is the sole originator of all policy, the original leader was not original in all of his ideas. Even Juche, hailed as the fundamental original Korean ideology, has been attributed to earlier Korean philosophers. In sum, the model for the prison camp system may have come from the gulags established by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, which ironically might have come into North Korea as a reaction against a wave of de-Stalinization, led by the Soviet Union, in the 1950s. Another possibility is that Kim's departure from Soviet doctrine indicated a shift closer to Maoist China.

Development of the prison camp system

North Korean history produced an endless wave after wave of persecuted individuals, yet there is no coherent trail showing when the political and penal mechanisms developed to systematically accommodate them. The story of persecuted groups in North Korea begins with the country's origin following Japan's defeat in WWII and the liberation of the Korean peninsula. In the North, Kim Il Sung systematically purged his political opponents, creating a highly centralized system that accorded him unlimited power and generated a formidable cult of personality. North Korea instituted a revolution that included genuinely popular reforms such as establishing an eight-hour work day, promoting literacy, and positing the formal equality of the sexes. However, it also included a purge of Koreans in the police and government bureaucracies who had collaborated with the Japanese colonization of Korea and a sweeping land reform program that expropriated the landholdings of absentee Japanese landlords and the native Korean landed aristocracy. Numerous purged police officials and disposed Korean landlords fled to the south, but their family members who remained in the north remained under suspicion, and many would end up imprisoned in the North Korean prison system. During the Korean War, North Koreans accused of collaboration with the United States, South Korea, and the United Nations Command were also imprisoned.

While Kim attempted to fuse returning Korean exiles (mostly members of the Chinese, Japanese, or Soviet Russian communist parties) into the Korean Workers Party, his plans for northern Korea were challenged by other Korean political parties affiliated with two religions: Protestant Christianity and an indigenous syncretic faith known as "Eastern Learning" (Donghak), later called "Church of the Heavenly Way" (Cheondogyo). These religious-based social movements had led the internal opposition to Japanese colonial rule in Korea and were very well organized in the northern areas of the Korean peninsula. One of these leaders was actually a first choice by the Soviets (over Kim Il Sung) to lead the newly minted North Korean state in 1945, but he turned down the invitation. Suppressing these non-communist parties led to numerous arrests and executions. And again, family members who remained in the north remained under suspicion.

Another round of purges occurred during the fallout after the attempt to overthrow Kim Il Sung in 1956. Here, the practice of "self-criticism" was introduced. People at all levels of the party, including Politburo members and government ministers, were forced to undergo these purposefully humiliating displays of dedication to the Party. These were uniquely cruel, as some victims were ousted from their jobs while a smaller number of individuals even lost their lives. This 1950s wave of persecution finally left the only faction Kim Il Sung desired: his loyal band of Manchuria-based, communist, anti-Japanese partisans who became the enduring foundation of the present North Korean regime. Yet, there are no references in the documentation to a collectivization process or a systemic means of imprisoning accused "traitors" in dedicated camps.

Today, the internment camps for people accused of political offenses or denounced as politically unreliable are reportedly run by the Ministry of State Security. Yet in practice, the distribution of roles between the respective security agencies has apparently varied over time and between provinces, influenced by political priorities, available capacity, the relative power of senior officials, and the extent to which a particular agency enjoyed the trust of the supreme leader. In many cases, the three main security agencies—State Security Department, Ministry of People's Security, and Military Security Command—competed to show their efficiency in identifying ideological opponents to gain favor with the leader. In relation to incidents or issues seen as major political threats, the leader or central-level decision-making organs required security agencies to coordinate their investigations. There are reports, for example, that semi-permanent structures were set up by secret order of Kim Jong Il and maintained under Kim Jong Un.

Such a huge prison camp system – operating in secret and completely outside the law and the reach of the law, such as is the case in North Korea – risks becoming a dumping ground for all sorts of persons. It is widely suspected that the North Korean camps, then, became the sites for un-repatriated South Korean prisoners of war from the Korean War, or for other South Korean and Japanese citizens who have been abducted by North Korean security and police operatives over the course of the last thirty to forty years of the 20th century, and into the 21st century.

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