Starving fugitives 'sold as sex slaves' to Chinese men

Thousands of North Korean fugitives living and hiding in China are forced to become slave labourers or prostitutes, or are sold and resold to Chinese men as "sex toys", campaigners said yesterday.

There are between 10,000 and 300,000 Korean refugees hiding in China and monitors for Human Rights Watch (HRW) found those they spoke to were resigned to a sub-human existence in China. Many fear they will be captured and sent home to serve a life sentence in one of North Korea's notorious prison camps, where inmates are reportedly experimented on with chemicals, starved or shot.

Yu Sang Jun, a North Korean farmer, and his South Korean rescuer, Chun Ki Won, were in London yesterday to urge the international community to condemn China for failing to recognise thousands of North Koreans as refugees.

Mr Yu's wife and his four-year-old son starved to death in the North Korean famine of the late 1990s, when they were reduced to eating grass and tree bark.

In 1998, he and his seven-year-old son, Chul Min, joined hundreds of thousands of refugees risking death to flee to China. Beijing treats them as "economic migrants" and deports them to North Korea, where they face execution for fleeing – a crime tantamount to treason.

While working in near-slave conditions in a cement factory, Mr Yu was found by Mr Chun, a South Korean missionary who has rescued more than 150 North Korean refugees in China. Mr Yu fled with 10 others to Mongolia but Chul Min, then aged 10, lost his guide and died in the desert.

In December last year, Mr Chun was arrested in China while attempting to transport 12 North Koreans, including a pregnant woman, across the Mongolian border. He served seven months in a Chinese jail.

Mike Jendrzejczyk, of HRW, said: "North Korea bears the main responsibility for this exodus of refugees, who are fleeing hunger and human rights abuses. But the Chinese government has important responsibilities too; forcibly returning asylum-seekers is a blatant violation of international law."

The group is also calling on China to stop the arrest and intimidation of missionaries and aid workers. Mr Chun, who is visiting Britain with an evangelical humanitarian group, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said: "Yu is free now, but he has lost everything."