(CNSNews.com) - Already in the spotlight over Tibet, the Chinese government is about to face a barrage of fresh attention and flak over its treatment of North Koreans who have escaped their impoverished Stalinist homeland.

In a series of events beginning Saturday in Washington, D.C., and around the world, "North Korea Freedom Week" aims to highlight the plight of what organizers call "the world's most persecuted people."

While the overall focus is the treatment of North Koreans at the hands of the regime in Pyongyang, Beijing's policy of forcibly repatriating refugees who have fled into China will take center stage this Olympics year.

"China's arrests and repatriations of North Korean refugees continue to escalate, and we only have this small window before the Olympics to encourage China to do the right thing and allow the refugees safe passage," North Korea Freedom Coalition (NKFC) chairman Suzanne Scholte said in a recent statement.

The NKFC and associated groups are organizing a protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington on Saturday, while similar events are planned at Chinese missions in London, Ottawa, Tokyo, Seoul and elsewhere. (In Japan and South Korea, the weekend events coincide with the latter stages of the international leg of the 2008 Beijing Olympic torch relay, which has been a magnet in many countries for protests against Chinese policies.)

A Capitol Hill rally next Tuesday will highlight rights violations inside North Korea and, again, the plight of refugees. Other Freedom Week events announced by the NKFC include worship services, film screenings, panel discussions and Congressional briefings. North Korean defectors will participate, and eyewitnesses will give testimonies of violations of religious freedom.

(Freedom Week partner Open Doors USA has labeled North Korea the world's number one persecutor of Christians, saying that Christians comprise up to 70,000 of the total 200,000 people estimated to be held in North Korean prison camps.)

Human rights and religious freedom advocacy groups have for years been campaigning against China's policy, saying that the North Korean refugees it arrests and sends back face imprisonment, torture and even execution.

The U.S. government says China is violating several articles of the 1951 International Refugee Convention, including one saying that no state may return a refugee to a territory where his life or freedom would be under threat.

But Beijing, Pyongyang's closest ally, says the North Koreans are illegal economic migrants rather than refugees protected under U.N. treaties.

Christian groups -- many of them South Korean -- working quietly in China to help the refugees have also been targeted by the state.

Earlier this month, reports emerged from China saying that the authorities, as part of a response to unrest in Tibet, had ordered Department of Religion officials in each province to clamp down on "foreign religious influences."

Citing staffers inside China, Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, a Japan-based non-governmental organization, said local churches found to be cooperating with foreign Christians were being shut down; those helping North Korean defectors were being arrested; and the bounty offered by the state for turning in one North Korean refugee had been increased 16 fold, to an amount roughly equivalent to the average annual income in China.

Despite the significant risks, thousands of North Koreans have crossed into China in the hope of making it to safety in third countries, and more than 12,000 have ended up in South Korea over the decades since the Korean War, most of them in recent years. The 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act mandates American assistance to refugees, although fewer than 50 are reported to have been allowed to settle in the U.S. since its passage (compared to almost 6,000 resettled in South Korea over the same period.)

Last week, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) introduced a reauthorization bill that aims to improve the original legislation's refugee processing and resettlement policies and its promotion of democracy and human rights in North Korea.

Ros-Lehtinen, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said she expected the bill to be approved by the committee before the end of April. Committee chairman Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) is a co-sponsor.

"North Koreans struggle to survive in deplorable conditions perpetuated by a brutal regime. Human rights violations are common and the appalling humanitarian conditions have compelled many people to flee the country just to survive," Ros-Lehtinen said.

"The combination of an intensified crackdown by China, which forcibly returns refugees, and recent public executions of border-crossers inside North Korea, have made the situation of North Korean refugees even more precarious."

Those refugees who survive transit through China to third countries, usually in Southeast Asia, face other hurdles.

Last week a group of refugees held in an immigration detention facility in Thailand and seeking permission to be resettled in the U.S. began a hunger strike in a bid to draw attention to their plight.

And late last month, members of a European human rights organization helped 12 other refugees breach security and enter a South Korean embassy in Laos to seek asylum.

South Korea has traditionally favored a low-key approach to refugees from the North, so as not to upset the delicate balance of relations with Pyongyang. Following a decade of liberal rule, the new government of conservative President Kim Myung-bak has vowed to take a tougher line with North Korea on human rights as well as on the issue of its nuclear weapons programs.

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