LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - King said the U.S. has made it clear to Pyongyang that it needs not only to address its nuclear weapons' programs but to improve its human rights record if it wants to participate fully within the international community.

The international spotlight is on North Korea over its plans to launch a long-range rocket as early as this week. The launch will mark the centennial of the nation's founder, in a move that Washington says will derail a recent U.S.-North Korean agreement to provide food aid in return for nuclear concessions.

According to South Korean intelligence, the North is also preparing its third nuclear weapons test.

"Clearly the nuclear issue is a critical issue that needs to be dealt with in North Korea. It's an issue that threatens North Korea's neighbors, Japan (and) South Korea," King said. "At the same time, we have also to deal with human rights."

The report on the North's prison camps is by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a U.S.-based private group and the organizer of the conference. The report documents the alleged incarceration of entire families, including children and grandparents for the "political crimes" of other family members.

The camps also perform infanticide and forced abortions of female prisoners who illegally crossed into China and got pregnant by men there, and were then forcibly repatriated to North Korea.

"It is not just nuclear weapons that have to be dismantled," Roberta Cohen, chairwoman of the committee's board of directors says, "but an entire system of political repression."

The North Korean camp system was initially modeled in the 1950s on the Soviet gulag to punish "wrong thinkers" and those belonging to the "wrong political class" or religious persuasion.

Working with state security agency officials who defected to South Korea, the report estimates that the camp system holds between 150,000 and 200,000 people out of a total population of around 24 million.

King compared the vast number of North Korean detainees with the hundreds imprisoned in Soviet prison camps in the 1970s. He cited anecdotal reports that people have faced arrest, torture and imprisonment for making a joke about North Korean leaders and being overheard by government informants.

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