North Korean justice system treats people as ‘less than animals’: HRW
Torture, humiliation and coerced confessions are rampant in North Korea's pretrial detention system which treats people as worth "less than an animal", a rights group said yesterday in a report on the country's opaque legal processes.
US-based Human Rights Watch drew on interviews with dozens of former North Korean detainees and officials to highlight what it called inhuman conditions at detention facilities that often amount to torture.
Nuclear-armed North Korea, accused of widespread rights abuses by the United Nations and other critics, is a "closed" country and little is known about its criminal justice system.
Mistreatment of detainees -- beating with a stick or kicking -- was "especially harsh" in the early stages of pretrial detention, interviewees said.
"The regulations say there shouldn't be any beatings, but we need confessions during the investigation and early stages of the preliminary examination," a former police officer said.
"So you have to hit them in order to get the confession."
Former detainees said they were forced to sit still on the floor, kneeling or with their legs crossed, for as long as 16 hours a day, with even a flicker of movement leading to punishment.
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