Kim Cheol Ok managed a hasty phone call to inform her family about her imminent deportation to North Korea on October 9.

On that day, Cheol Ok and 500 other North Koreans living in China were forcibly repatriated. Her bigger sister in London, who managed to escape during the Great Famine of the 1990s, fears for her life.

"I am sure she is being beaten," Kim Kyu Li tells DW in her London flat, where she lives in exile.

In North Korea, prisoners often die from starvation and illnesses caused by malnutrition.

"They eat mice and cockroaches and get sick from it," Kyu Li says.

From countryside to prison

When Cheol Ok arrived in China at the age of just 14, she was married off to a man 30 years her senior by a trafficker. Together, they had a daughter, who is a Chinese citizen.

However, Cheol Ok was never granted a Chinese residence permit and, for 25 years, lived in seclusion in a rural area in China's northeastern Jilin province. She worked in the fields and later in restaurants. Her husband treated her well despite the circumstances, according to her sister Kyu Li. 

But that all changed earlier this year. In April 2023, she was arrested by the Chinese police, presumably during an attempt to leave the country.

"She didn't do anything. Her only offense was that she was born in North Korea," says Kyu Li. 

Old wounds

Cheol Ok's deportation to North Korea has opened wounds in her family that have never fully healed.

Alongside Kyu Li, a second older sister now resides in London. Kim Yu Bin was once deported back from China to North Korea before she eventually managed to escape. The memory of her own abuse and mistreatment haunts her to this day. 

"Ever since my sister was arrested, I have terrible nightmares," she shares with DW. 

Yu Bin mentions that her brother died in North Korean custody, the details of his harrowing death relayed through fellow inmates who managed to escape.

"He was beaten to death, stuffed into a rice sack, and thrown away," she says. "It broke my heart." 

The family's greatest fear now is that Cheol Ok may face a similar fate.

Others like her

DW also spoke to other North Koreans who had been deported back to their home country from China before finally managing to escape to South Korea. They say they were treated inhumanely while detained. 

"We were treated as if we were less than animals," 50-year-old Lee Young Joo says in a video interview from her home in South Korea.

She was regularly beaten during interrogations. 

"If I hesitated for even a second to answer questions, they had already prepared the baton to torture me with," she says. "I was beaten all over, including my head and face."

'Political criminals' 

More than 1,000 eyewitness accounts have been collected by Korea Future, an organization that documents human rights abuses in the North Korean penal system. 

North Koreans who manage to escape the country and are repatriated face a brutal interrogation process aimed at determining their motives for leaving. 

Did they flee to escape poverty, or were they attempting to make it to South Korea? The regime considers the latter an especially heinous crime as South Korea is considered its archenemy.

Pyongyang also hunts down diplomats who have defected and hackers who once did its bidding in China, according to information obtained by DW's investigative unit. 

"Detainees, regardless of whether they are classified as economic or political criminals, experience positional torture," says Yoo Suyeon from Korea Future. "This means they are forced to sit cross-legged for more than 12 hours every day. Any movement or sound can result in individual or collective punishment."

Beijing looks away

Despite the growing reports of torture in North Korea, China continues to deport North Koreans to their country of origin. 

"China actually has obligations under both the refugee convention and protocol, as well as the torture convention, not to send back people to countries where they would face torture," says international law expert Ethan Hee-Seok Shin from the Transitional Justice Working Group, which filed a petition to the UN on Cheol Ok's behalf.

Earlier this year, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights official asked China, Pyongyang's closest ally, to end its forced repatriation of North Koreans, saying it could "put them at risk of serious human rights violations such as arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings."

But Beijing has dismissed the allegations, saying there is "currently no evidence of torture or so-called 'massive human rights violations' in North Korea." 

Instead, China classifies North Koreans as irregular economic migrants and not refugees, effectively denying them protection by the Geneva Refugee Convention.

DW has repeatedly sought comments from both the Chinese and North Korean governments. China did not respond, while North Korea's Embassy in Berlin, in a brief written statement, dismissed the accusations in connection with the deportations as "misleading propaganda" by "the United States and hostile forces."

Hope and uncertainty

The families of detainees in North Korea often choose to remain silent, fearing to expose their loved ones to additional danger. However, Kim Kyu Li has opted to make the fight for her missing sister public. She even traveled to New York to raise her voice at a recent meeting of the International Criminal Court.

In her London flat, she directly addresses her missing sister, even though she knows her sibling can't hear her. 

"Cheol Ok, stay strong and don't give up."

Kim Cheol Ok is unlikely to be released from prison, says Ethan Hee-Seok Shin, whose organization supports her family. 

"But at least their hope and our hope, too, is that this kind of international attention will make it more difficult for the North Korean authorities to abuse or torture her."

Edited by: Lewis Sanders