North Korea

North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, was established in 1948 under Kim Il Sung as a Soviet-backed one-party state built on the doctrine of Juche and has since been led by three generations of the Kim family. The Workers' Party of Korea holds a constitutional monopoly on power, and observers widely describe the country as the world's most repressive, maintaining a discriminatory songbun classification system that fixes each family's access to food, schooling and work by its judged loyalty to the state. Political prisoners are held without trial in kwanliso camps; the United Nations Commission of Inquiry's 2014 report found that between 80,000 and 120,000 people were then held in the four largest camps, that inmates have been eliminated over five decades through deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture and rape, and that the state's conduct amounts to crimes against humanity resembling the totalitarian camps of the twentieth century.