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SEOUL - For the first 22 years of his life Shin Dong-Hyok's home address was Political Prison Camp No 14, Gaechon County, South Pyeongan Province, North Korea.
He grew up knowing nothing but a life of unimaginable hardship in one of North Korea's ITAL Kwanli-so TNX, the gulag system built by Kim Il Sung in 1972 to work prisoners until they died.
His "crime" was to have been born to parents who the regime had categorised as from the "hostile classes" - the 27 per cent of the population that are considered national enemies, impure elements and reactionaries. Under Kim Jong Il's "three generation" policy, the family members of anyone who commits a political crime are punished alongside the perpetrator, even if they have yet to be born. Two years ago Shin did the unthinkable. He escaped from the labour camp of his birth and then from the world's most secretive and repressive state. Now he has begun trying to rebuild his life in South Korea.
He has never told his story in public before but, as the international community courts the regime of Kim Jong-Il in a bid to wrestle nuclear weapons from his grasp, Shin has broken his silence in order to alert the world to the estimated 200,000 people still held in labour camps.
With no education beyond the simple writing and maths taught in Camp 14's school, Shin speaks slowly and unsteadily in short but concise sentences.
"I don't know why I was there," he says. "I was simply born there. I knew nothing of the outside world. I had no complaints, I just accepted my lot."
In 1996, at the age of 14, he was forced to watch the execution of his mother and brother. They were caught trying to escape from the camp. His mother was hanged, and his brother was shot, in front of him.
Lifting his shirt Shin reveals a wild and angry scar left by the camp's torturers as they applied burning hot coals to his back during the interrogation following his mother's failed escape.
The tip of the middle finger on his right hand meanwhile is missing, sliced off as punishment for dropping a table for a sewing machine.
On January 2, 2005, Shin and a friend were collecting firewood.
They noticed that a section of the electrified barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp was unguarded and decided to make a run for it. His friend was electrocuted and died instantly but Shin somehow managed to crawl through, suffering horrific burns to his legs in the process.
For the next 25 days he walked and hitched his way to the Chinese border.
"I broke into three houses and took what food and money I could find," he says. "Eventually I came across a group of merchants and peddlers who were heading into China and joined them." He breezed past the border guards by bribing them with cigarettes.
Kim Sang-Hun, an activist with a decade's experience of defectors, is convinced he is telling the truth.
"Whether he will ever be able to overcome the psychological trauma of what he's been through I simply don't know," says Kim. Yesterday, they both visited the Foreign Office and Tory leader David Cameron.
Meanwhile, Christian Solidarity Worldwide has released a report arguing that the level of abuse in North Korea is so systematic and widespread that it constitutes a crime against humanity, which individual states and the United Nations have a responsibility to prosecute.
Shin cannot forget those he left behind. "Please don't make me out to be a hero," he says. "I was a coward. Inside the prisons there were real heroes - people who refused to confess as the guards executed them. There are many more still in these prisons."
- INDEPENDENT
