SEOUL, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- Human rights activists and religious leaders from around the world Friday adopted a statement to urge North Korea to end human rights violations and dismantle Soviet-style gulags where political prisoners are tortured and often executed.
In the declaration, experts and representatives from 40 global human rights groups also urged North Korea to return South Korean prisoners of war and others held in the communist country against their will.
The activists who include North Korean defectors also called on South Korea and other nations to increase efforts to improve human rights conditions in North Korea and address the plight facing North Koreans asylum-seekers stranded in China.
The six-point "Seoul Declaration" was adopted during a three-day conference on North Korean human rights that began in Seoul Thursday.
The U.S. ambassador to Seoul and Washington's envoy for human rights in North Korea backed the statement, calling for vigorous international efforts to enhance human rights in the communist state.
The conference, "Seoul Summit: Promoting Human Rights in North Korea," is organized by human rights groups and Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization partially funded by the U.S. government.
This is the second conference on human rights in North Korea following the first in Washington in July. The next one is scheduled to open in Brussels next March, aimed at highlighting the humanitarian condition in North Korea.
In the meeting, human rights groups described North Korea as one of the worst places in the world, with a network of concentration camps and tortures and public executions.
"North Korea must end the human rights abuses that include absolute obedience to the great leader, imprisonment without trial, guilt by association and the punishment of up to three generations, use of food as a political weapon and public executions," the declaration said.
The declaration expressed concerns about human rights abuses particularly in North Korean concentration camps that house political prisoners, a charge Pyongyang has denied.
"North Korea must dismantle the concentration camps where approximately two hundred thousand people are imprisoned," it said.
South Korean officials estimate that some 200,000 people are being held in about 10 to 12 concentration camps in North Korea. Gulag escapees have described routine public executions in the camps.
In a testimony at the Seoul conference, Kim Tae-jin, who was detained in a concentration camp in Yodok before fleeing to South Korea, said anybody caught trying to escape was publicly executed.
"Every inmate is called to watch the execution at a close distance," he said. Kim also said most inmates suffered from health problems caused by malnutrition.
Kang Chol-hwan, another North Korean gulag escapee living in Seoul, said in another forum he witnessed 15 public executions. Condemned prisoners' mouths were being stuffed with rocks to muffle their cries as they were shot by a firing squad, falling into an already-dug grave, said Kang, the author of a book, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag."
A CNN documentary recently aired images from video smuggled from North Korea that showed a public execution in a concentration camp. In one clip, people gather on a hillside to watch the firing-squad execution of a man accused of helping a defector cross into China.
The human rights resolution also accused North Korea of abducting or detaining more than 80,000 South Koreans and an unknown number of Japanese since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. It called for an immediate repatriation.
The Seoul Declaration also called on the North to "quickly and efficiently distribute" international food aid and medicine to its children and others in need to prevent further worsening of conditions there.
Human rights activists criticized South Korea's low-key stance toward human rights abuse in the North.
"We ask the South Korean government to have a genuine interest in the human rights conditions in North Korea. It should be the South Korean government which must show the most sincerity for the human rights conditions of its Northern brethren," the declaration said.
Participants agreed to meet every year around the International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10 to promote human rights in North Korea.
In a speech at the conference, Jay Lefkowitz, the special U.S. envoy for North Korean human rights, called for "immediate" action to help North Koreans.
"Only a short distance from here lies a hidden world of hopelessness and terror. It is populated by the same people, people of same heritage as those who live here," he said.
He also urged China to grant the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees access to North Korean defectors in the country.
"We seek to work with all nations that have North Korean refugees on their soil," Lefkowitz said.
Seoul-based human rights groups say more than 100,000 North Korean asylum-seekers are believed to be hiding in China and Russia in hopes of reaching South Korea for resettlement.
In response to the human rights conference in Seoul, North Korea on Friday described the United States as "the worst human rights violator." It has accused Washington of using humanitarian issues as a tool to topple it leader, Kim Jong-Il.
