North Korea has been expanding space for women prisoners in its notorious gulags because large numbers who have escaped the communist regime are being forcibly returned from China.

That is the finding of a new report which claims 'scores of thousands' of prisoners have died in the camps over the years, despite North Korea denying existence of the gulags.

Among the atrocities former inmates say they were subjected to include forced labour, savage beatings, starvation, episodic executions and other crimes against humanity.

North Korea has been expanding space for women prisoners in its notorious gulags. A female North Korean soldier is pictured looking out from behind a barbed wire fence around a labour prison camp

Details of the grim conditions have been revealed in a new report by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a Washington-based non-profit group.

David Hawk, author of the report, told Fox News that the 1,000-women expansion of space at a formerly all-male labour camp likely means that other prisons for women 'are overflowing with the arrival of larger numbers of North Korean women forcibly repatriated from China.'

He said women are imprisoned for the 'crime' of leaving North Korea, where many flee to China in an attempt to avoid starvation and to find slightly better economic opportunities in order to survive.

The Committee says their return by Chinese authorities is a contravention of international humanitarian law, because the women face punishment for something that is considered a basic human right.

Mr Hawk claims that when driven back to North Korea by the 'bus-load' many are 'interrogated, often brutally'.

Their punishment can see them sentenced to between six months and three years of hard labour and placed in the labour camp system.

Claim: A new human rights group report suggests North Korea has taken the decision to expand its prisons because large numbers of women who have escaped the regime are being forcibly returned from China

Among the atrocities former inmates say they were subjected to include forced labour, savage beatings, starvation, episodic executions and other crimes against humanity. North Korean soldiers are pictured

GOSSIP COST ME MY WHOLE FAMILY When Kim Young Soon was reported for ‘gossiping’ about then North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, three generations of her family were thrown into a brutal labour camp. Her elderly parents and four young children all died after being imprisoned with her under a system of ‘guilt by association’. She survived after being held at Yodok for nine years over the accusation that she gossiped about an affair her friend had with Kim Jong-il, the father of current leader Kim Jong-un. Young Soon told Amnesty International: ‘The guilt by association system applies to the family members – my mother and father, who were over 70 years old, my nine-year-old daughter and my three sons, who were seven, four and one. ‘When my parents starved to death, I didn’t have coffins for them. I wrapped their bodies with straw, carried them on my back and went to bury them myself. And the children… I lost all my family.’ Describing conditions at Yodok, she said: ‘It is a place that would make your hair stand on end.’ Advertisement

The revelation comes 18 months after shocking sketches emerged of the mistreatment of prisoners in North Korean gulags, depicting how inmates resorted to eating mice and were forced to drag other prisoner's corpses to the crematorium under armed guard.

The drawings came from the recollections of Kim Kwang-il, a 48-year-old man who was a North Korean prisoner for two years before he defected to South Korea in February 2009.

After he defected, he got professional artists to draw sketches of his experiences in the gulag prisons, depicting the different aspects of inhuman treatment by the Kim regime's prison guards.

Kwang-il's drawings were subsequently included in a UN report that accuses North Korea of crimes against humanity, including 'torture, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence' as well as continued starvation of inmates.

North Korean security chiefs and possibly even Kim Jong Un, the leader of the country, should face international justice for ordering systematic torture, starvation and killings comparable to Nazi-era atrocities, UN investigators said at the time.

UN commission chairman Michael Kirby said leader Kim Jong-un could be held personally accountable for crimes committed by his henchmen, and called for the world to take action against the state.

Mr Kirby said the alleged atrocities were ‘wrongs that shock the conscience of humanity’ and warned there could now be no excuse for the international community if it failed to act.