Mr Kim was arrested by North Korean police in mid-2004 and charged with illegally crossing the border and smuggling. He had crossed the border to sell pine nuts. For this he was sentenced to six years in prison. He defected to South Korea in February 2009 where he published a book about his time in detention. The book contained drawings made by professional artists based on his recollections of the torture he was subjected to and some of the horrific scenes he witnessed. The following is an edited version of his testimony. You can read his testimony in full, along with the report itself - including transcripts and video - on the UN website. Michael Kirby (Commission chair) And have you seen a book called Evidence Jeongeori Prison which contains a number of sketches, which relate to punishment and violence against people in custody? Do they relate to the way you were treated in the investigation stage or to how you how were subsequently treated when you were taken to the Jeongeori prison?

Mr. Kim Kwang Il Well, not just similar. I actually got worse treatment than the pictures that are shown in the book. How do you find conditions in which you were detained? Describe them. I went into the Kyohwaso in September 21. This was the first thing that I saw: there it said that “if you run, you die” – that’s what it said there. If you run away you are going to be shot to death. That’s what I saw on the first day of my entry into the edification centre. And I actually saw people carrying dead bodies on a carriage. Let me tell you a story that happened at the detention house first. Images of drawings, which appear in a book called “Eyewitness: A Litany of North Korean Crimes Against Humanity, Prima-facie Evidence, Jeongeori Prison”, volume 1, published by the North Korea Human Rights The Third Way. And there are being shown to us on screen. I hold a hard copy print version of the book. I will mark the hard copy print version of the book exhibit S-29. Yes, proceed.

There is this torture that happens before you come to the prison camp. At the detention centre, we are on our knees and there is a glass and we are supposed to be in the same position until the glass is filled. We are supposed to think there’s an imaginary motorcycle and we are supposed to be in this position as if we are riding the motorcycle. And for this, we pose as if we are airplanes ourselves. We are flying. And if we stand like this there’s no way that you can hold that position for a long time. You are bound to fall forward. Everybody in the detention centre goes through this kind of this torture. What is the point of the torture? Does it have any purpose except to instruct you? If you gave the statement that the people wanted to hear, you are okay but if you didn’t give the right statement, you are beaten up and you are instructed to receive a correctional training, meaning torture. And if you did anything to cause disorder in the detention centre, you would be tortured. We get up at 5 in the morning. We are supposed to sit and be on our knees, our heads on the floor and stay in that position until it’s 10 pm. By law usually we are supposed to be in one position for 5 minutes and then take a break but sometimes you are made to be in the same position as long as 10 hours. If we try to move because we feel exhausted, then we would be beaten again.

How long did you last doing this motorcycle or aeroplane torture? As for me I think I was able to be in that position for maybe about 20 minutes. I was in that motorcycle position and I was told to be in that motorcycle position until my sweat would fill that one glass, that glass in front of me. You will never imagine what that’s like. Yes. What followed that? After the torture we are bound to stay in that position until the jailer feels that you have been tortured enough. So the torture goes on until the time has come to the satisfaction of the jailer. This is the pigeon torture. This is a very strange word in Korea and to you. Your hands are bound back and if they tie you like this, your chest comes out forward and in this position you are tortured. Feet are on the ground but your hands are tied behind your back?

Yes, that is correct. And I see that one of the persons shown is vomiting. Yes, he’s vomiting. And is there any administration or punishment in this position or is the position itself the punishment? Any beatings? This position itself is the torture. And additionally you are beaten up as well. If you did not give the right statement during the preliminary hearing, you get this kind of torture. You are beaten up, which leads to vomiting because you feel very uncomfortable inside. Sometimes you would vomit blood.

What followed that? You collapsed. You collapsed. You lose your consciousness and if you collapsed, they made you lay down in a jail in the detention centre. What other punishments were inflicted on you? How long did this course of treatment last? Before the trial the people who did the preliminary hearing told me that I did not deserve going to the prison camp but that I had no choice. So I knew that I didn’t deserve it and I knew that my crimes only deserved, for example, 6 months of detention. And these tortures were not given specifically for the crimes that I committed – everybody received these kinds of tortures. And there are so many accidents and diseases going on in the jail and we starved.

In North Korea, chronic malnutrition, starvation, accidents are business as usual in camps. Based on my personal experience when I was in the detention centre for 11 days, 8 people died. Yes, you were there for 11 days. Are there any other punishments you want to show to us that you suffered? This is the picture of the detention centre. This is what happens inside. Everybody suffers from malnutrition. The person standing is, I think is, the guard. People whose height is over 170 meters can never come out of the correctional camp walking out, because the taller you are the more possibility there is to suffer from malnutrition. In the jail they determine whether you are physically weak or not by stripping you naked and they see how your butt cheeks are. If your butt cheeks are apart and loose, the guards see if their fists can fit in between the butt cheeks. And that’s how they determine if you are weak or not. The person standing up receives ‘class 1 weakness’, the one standing to sideways is ‘2nd class’, and the third person is ‘3rd class’. So if you are determined to be weak like them, you will never make it out of this camp.

[unclear] Is it just an inevitable consequence of the punishments you received? Do you consider that this is a deliberate policy that people will not make out of the camp or is it simply the consequence of type of treatment that you received? In the detention centre, most people became very weak. The food they gave us was less than 80 grams per meal but if you did something wrong, if you slipped up, they would give you less. By law you are supposed to be given 100 grams but we did not get enough and they fed us some things that not even the pigs would eat, like for example, rotten cucumber. Boiled rotten cucumber was given to eat. And if we refused to eat that we would be punished. Sometimes we would be punished by being given less than 50 grams. Six months after being in these detention camps you would not be able to stay alive. Before you go to these prison camps, you are given physical fitness tests to see if you will be able to endure what goes on in that camp. Everybody almost passes that physical fitness but sometimes they would fail the test. Nonetheless they would enter the political camps. So with chronic malnutrition, torture, starvation and diseases, you are bound to easily fall to class 1 weakness.

If none of your family visits you, meaning you are neglected, you will fall to class 2 and class 3. So it only takes about 15 minutes for somebody very weak to be classified as class 3 weakness. This picture – because we starved so much and did not have enough to eat, we would find snakes in street. I know this sounds terrible to you. How do you eat a snake in the street? But for us the first one to find it was the person who got to eat it. Everybody raced to catch those snakes and that’s because we were so starved. We slept like this in the training camp. The capacity of this prison was 800 people but when I was there, there were 2400 of us. Sometimes they would have up to 4000 people, which means in one room there were over 60, 70 people in a cell that could only be occupied by 14, 17 people. Sometimes there were up to 170 people. For example those who worked in auto repairs so you can’t lie on your back, you have to lie on your sideways. Your feet would be on top of somebody’s head and somebody’s feet would be on top of your head. Sometimes people would sleep standing up and you would take turns lying down and standing up. In that kind of environment sometimes you are so exhausted that you want to give up, end your own life. And sometimes because it’s so intense inside, the inmates may abuse each other and that’s how weak we were. Should an accident happen we would easily die. That’s why we had guards among us to see if anybody was so weak that they would decide to commit suicide.

In summer when it’s suffocating we slept naked and if you sleep naked you get serious hygiene problems. To put it literally, we lived in a hole of human defecation. So if somebody got sick, it would just spread out throughout the cell immediately. In North Korea there’s a fever disease; if that breaks out in a cell it would spread immediately and result in massive death. In North Korea if you get sick in these camps, there’s nothing you can do. There are medics and there are paramedics in these jails but they don’t have any medicine so if you have a contagious disease that breaks out, for example, if you are lucky enough to get any shots or medicine that your family members bring when they visit you, you are lucky. But there were over 500 people and there is no way that the medic could give you shots to prevent any contagious diseases. If something like this happened here in South Korea you would be punished for it but my camp, if you caught one you are unfortunate and if you were able to get well then you would be lucky. So when we had this high fever we didn’t have anything to eat and at the time I had clothes that I had bought from China and it was quite decent. Now I refused to give those clothes to this person who brought the food to us. I’m sorry, I’m getting very emotional right now. How long did you serve in this prison?

2 years and 5 months. During that time did you see many people die, or some people die? So many people died. What proportion of the prison population… how many people did you actually see die or dead, approximately? Was it 10, 20? I can’t believe you are asking me this question. It was over 100. There are so many dead bodies. I can’t believe you are asking this question. People who slept next to me in one cell, because of high fever, 8 people died. The first day I was there, there were 4 or 5 [corpses].

I am asking you this question because the government of North Korea says that what you are saying is a total falsehood. You said you saw 100 dead bodies. Where were the bodies taken? On the map, on the image, show us the place where they were taken. It’s not in the map. There is a Bulmang mountain away from this area. This is Hadong, this is Jungdong. And here, this is Sangdong. From the left road, from Sangdong if you go two kilometres, there is this mountain and there is a cave. There is a pot where we put the dead bodies. What happens when they are put there? Did you actually transport the dead bodies to the place on the mountain? You yourself? If somebody died in our cell, the people who were strong enough would take the bodies. Do you know what happened to the bodies when you took them and unloaded them from truck on the side of mountain? Were they buried or were they burned? What was the practice, do you know?

We didn’t carry them with a truck. This is a wrong picture. So how would you carry them? By cart. We didn’t carry one or two dead bodies. We piled the bodies until there were enough to carry four to five bodies. Even if they rot in the heat in the summer we don’t carry them. So sometimes the bodies would decay and the mice would eat the bodies. We carry them by a cart that is as big as a truck. So sometimes we would have to take a break in between and we would get to the Bulmang Mountain. We would put these bodies into this pot. We would light a fire. It’s not like we… it’s like burning rubbish, burning garbage and if you see inside the pot you would see the bones that have not been burned and sometimes you get the powders of these bones. We would take them to the fields and use them as fertiliser.

And this is also part of the duties the fellow prisoners have to perform? Loading Yes. Yes. Inmates died… [unclear]. Because we saw so many people die, we became so used to it. I’m sorry to say that we became so used to it that we didn’t feel anything. In North Korea, sometimes people on the verge of dying would ask for something to eat. Or when somebody died we would strip them naked and we would wear the clothes. Those alive have to go on, those dead, I’m sorry, but they’re dead, but we become used to this.