North Korean labor camps a ghastly prospect for U.S. journalists
If their sentence is carried out, Laura Ling and Euna Lee face possible torture and even death in North Korea’s notorious gulag system, experts say.
North Korea’s sentencing of two American TV journalists to 12 years of hard labor Monday could imperil the Obama administration’s already difficult goal of curtailing the authoritarian nation’s nuclear weapons ambitions.
If no deal is reached, the two women face a grim future in a brutal prison system notorious for its lack of adequate food and medical supplies and its high death rate.
Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, were convicted by the nation’s top Central Court of an unspecified “grave crime” against the hard-line regime after they were arrested in March along the Chinese-North Korean border while reporting a story on human trafficking.
In a terse statement Monday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency did not say where the women are to serve the time. North Koreans who receive similar sentences of “reform through labor” often face starvation and torture in a penal system many consider among the world’s most repressive, said David Hawk, author of the 2004 study “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps.”
