SEOUL - North Korea's worst concentration camp is a reeducation center where women who escaped to China are subjected to the most brutal treatment, NGO Good Friends said Monday.

The Jeungsan Reeducation Center in South Pyongan Province has a reputation for cruelty and the saying goes that even healthy people leave as cripples.

The facility was turned into a reeducation center after the regime revised the criminal law in 2004.

Before the law was revised, North Korea had four kinds of detention centers – reeducation, education, confinement and labor training camps in descending order of severity.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il himself is said to have turned the center into a kind of "Papillon" prison island, giving instructions that every prisoner's year there should feel like 10.

The camp has since 1999 been used to detain female defectors. The North tightened controls for fear of regime collapse amid the famine of the 1990s, which sent many fleeing hunger and starvation. China regularly cooperated in the atrocity by sending refugees back to the North. Short of space at political camps, the regime started to put women in the Jeungsan camp.

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