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When it appeared nearly ten years ago, The Hidden Gulag, a report written by David Hawk for the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea represented a breakthrough in our understanding of the North Korean system of repression. Interviewing refugees who had either worked in or had been incarcerated in the North Korean penal system, and working, in the pre-Google Earth era, with a provider of satellite photography, Hawk and his collaborators were not only able to describe the workings of the system, but to document the camps visually as well. After The Hidden Gulag it was impossible to deny the existence or magnitude of the kwanliso, or prison camps.
This past week Hawk and the Committee released a second edition. As Hawk indicated in remarks at the Peterson Institute, the much larger numbers of refugees now residing in South Korea as well as advances in satellite photography have enabled access both to a larger number of interviewees with direct experience in the system, as well as a much more extensive trove of digital imagery. Our collective thinking about such abuses have evolved as well: new legal definitions of crimes against humanity were developed in conjunction to the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court, and Hawk argues that against this standard, the North Korean gulag does indeed constitute a crime against humanity. It is the same conclusion reached by legal scholars in the recent Genser and Cotler volume on responsibility to protect.
