north korea labor camps

north korea labor camps

Reporting from Seoul -- If North Korea carries out its controversial court verdict, two American TV journalists sentenced to 12 years of hard labor Monday face a grim future in a notorious gulag system, said the author of a study on the regime's prisons.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, were convicted by the nation's top Central Court of an undefined "grave crime" against the hard-line regime after they were reportedly arrested in North Korean territory in March.

In a typically terse statement issued Monday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported that the women were sentenced to 12 years of "reform through labor."

While Pyongyang has not said where the women will serve their time, their future likely includes the possibility of hard labor, 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."

Ling and Lee may be sent to a "kyo-hwa-so" or re-education reformatory "that is the equivalent of a felony penitentiary in the U.S., as opposed to a county jail or misdemeanor facility," he said.

"It's extremely hard labor under extremely brutal conditions," said Hawk. "These places have very high rates of deaths in detention. The casualties from forced labor and inadequate food supplies are very high."

Because the pair was tried by the nation's highest court, there can be no appeal, analysts say.

Obama administration officials said Monday that the White House is working "through all possible channels" to secure the release of the women.