Mrs Kim’s only crime was what Kim Jong-il’s regime calls yeon-jwa-je – guilt by association. In the early 1970s her grandfather defected to South Korea and under North Korea’s system of collective punishment for political crimes, the entire family was rounded up. “We were living in Pyongyang,” she explains, referring to North Korea’s capital. “I was just 13 at the time and the whole family had been classified by the state as a ‘dangerous element’.”

Ordered to leave her home by armed guards, she would not see the outside of a labour camp for the next 28 years. Mrs Kim was taken to Bukchang, a gulag run directly by the interior ministry, which refers to it by its bland official title: Kwan-li-so (penal-labour colony) No 18. A sprawling complex that straddles the Taedong river, it houses an estimated 10,000 inmates, the vast majority of whom are political prisoners serving life sentences in a country where life really does mean life.

The regime is slightly less strict than the camps at Yodok and Kaechon, but beatings, starvation and summary executions are still common. “We were always hungry,” recalls Mrs Kim. “Every day was a struggle to find food. The camp provided a single meal of corn gruel, but it was never enough. We would go out looking for anything green to eat. The most popular item was acorn leaves as they were easier to digest.” The misery of malnutrition was compounded by long bouts of forced labour – the average working day was 16 hours. The “lucky ones” worked on farms or in the prison itself but most toiled in coal mines that fed the nearby power station, slowly succumbing to exhaustion and disease.

As the decades passed, Mrs Kim’s grandmother died after years of hunger and her mother and brother were killed in work accidents.

Numerous testimonies of North Korean defectors confirm the practice of kin punishment (연좌제, yeonjwaje literally “association system”) in North Korea, under which three to eight generations of a political offender’s family can be summarily imprisoned or executed.[11] Such punishment is based on internal Workers’ Party protocols and lies outside the formal legal system.[12] Relatives are not told why they fell under suspicion and the punishment extends to children born in prison.[13] The association system was introduced with the North Korean state’s founding in 1948, having previously existed under the Joseon kingdom.[13][11]

During the European Middle Ages, a charge often meant an underage person placed under the supervision of a nobleman. Charges were the responsibility of the nobleman they were charged to, and they were usually expected to be treated as guests or a member of the household. Charges were at times used more or less openly as hostages, in order to keep their parents in line.