Ji Hyeon-A has escaped from the hermit kingdom three times, and three times she was sent back to face harrowing conditions.
At one detention centre, she described how inmates regularly starved to death without food while Kim Jong-Un gorges on expensive imported Swiss cheese and French red wine with no regard for his citizens.
In a deeply moving testimony in front of United Nations bosses, she explained how North Korean officials beat her and fed her only rotten food.
And she revealed prisoners are sometimes given raw locusts, skinned frogs and rats as food, as she painted a grim picture of what goes on inside the impoverished nation.
But the worst thing she says she witnessed in jail was the inmates’ dead bodies being given to the guard dogs for food.
Speaking at the UN, Ji Hyeon-A said she was repatriated three times to North Korea after she was caught in China, before eventually escaping the brutal regime.
She finally reached South Korea in 2007 and has since been reunited with her mother, brother and her younger sister – who was trafficked and sold into slavery after a failed escape attempt .
But the family has still heard nothing about their father.
Ji-Hyeon-A described North Korea as “a terrifying prison and the Kim’s are carrying out a vast massacre and it takes a miracle to survive there”.
There have been widespread allegations of brutalities such as murders, enslavement and torture of citizens by the North Korean regime – which the UN once described as “unparalleled in modern history”.
And Ji-Hyeon-A urged the Chinese government to stop sending North Koreans back to the regime as she called on world leaders to fight for defectors.
Her harrowing story was heard at a United Nations event entitled The Terrifying experience of forcibly Repatriated North Korean women and was sponsored by Britain, US, France, Japan, South Korea and Canada.
A statement from the Human Rights Watch read: “North Korea’s cruelty – described by the UN as, “unparalleled in the modern world,” – sees millions of its people suffer grave human rights violations at the hands of their own government, including torture, murder, enslavement, and rape.
“Unsurprisingly, these annual UN discussions are a thorn in China’s side, and compel Beijing to try and defend the indefensible.
“At the council today, China once again tried to block the meeting by insisting that the human rights situation in North Korea does not pose a threat to international peace and security.
“But the bulk of the council disagreed.”