On the Spot (CNSNews.com) - North Korea is responsible for more human rights violations than any other country in the world, said members of a conservative human rights organization and refugees who claim to have defected from North Korea.

The Defense Forum Foundation (DFF) held a luncheon Capitol Hill on Friday to help raise awareness of North Korean atrocities among Capitol Hill staffers.

"The people of North Korea have no freedom," Kim Young Il, who says he defected from North Korea to China in 1996. "No freedom of speech, no freedom of meeting, no freedom to travel as they wish and no freedom of religion," he told Cybercast News Service through a translator.

DFF President Suzanne Scholte told Cybercast News Service that human rights violations are worse in North Korea than in any other place, including Tibet. "There is a holocaust going on. Millions and millions of people have been killed by Kim Jong Il. He has with held food from 200,000 political prisoners, and used it as a political weapon," said Scholte. "North Koreans are by far the most persecuted people in the world."

The U.S. State Department listed North Korea as first in a list of the worst human rights-abusing countries for 2007. "The government's human rights record remained poor, and the regime continued to commit numerous serious abuses," said a report issued by the State Department on April 11, 2008.

The report also names a series of abuses such as extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detention, and torture which continue to be a part of daily life in North Korea.

"Citizens were denied freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and association, and the government attempted to control all information," the report says. "The government restricted freedom of religion, citizens' movement, and worker rights. There continued to be reports of severe punishment of some repatriated refugees."

Kim told Cybercast News Service that atrocities occurring in North Korea are little known in the West because North Korea, is isolated from the rest of the world by geography and its restrictive regime, which controls all information emanating from the country.

An Jin Hee, who says she also defected from North Korea to South Korea in 2005, said that when she was caught carrying a Bible she was accused of spying and spent 15 years in political prison for her crime. "During that time I was tortured and there were many things done to me that were unbearable," she said. "Eventually I escaped to South Korea."

An said she thinks Americans are beginning to slowly understand the plight of her people. "People in North Korea are brainwashed and taught to hate Americans," she said. "But through my attendance here in the U.S. I have come to realize that Americans do indeed care for North Korea."

DFF is a freedom and human rights organization that aims to educate congressional staffers about the need to re-build America's defenses.

According to DFF's Web site, the organization works closely with North Korean defectors living in South Korea and helps North Korean refugees escape to freedom.

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