gulag

背筋が寒くなるようなニュースですが、アメリカ人女性ジャーナリストが今年3月に北朝鮮当局に拘束され、その後裁判で”労働教化刑”の判決を受けたというニュースが米紙のトップにあがっています。

”労働教化刑”は"sentences of reform through labor"が相当するようです。

North Korea's sentencing of two American TV journalists to 12 years of hard labor Monday could imperil the Obama administration's already difficult goal of curtailing the authoritarian nation's nuclear weapons ambitions.

If no deal is reached, the two women face a grim future in a brutal prison system notorious for its lack of adequate food and medical supplies and its high death rate.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, were convicted by the nation's top Central Court of an unspecified "grave crime" against the hard-line regime after they were arrested in March along the Chinese-North Korean border while reporting a story on human trafficking.

In a terse statement Monday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency did not say where the women are to serve the time. North Koreans who receive similar sentences of "reform through labor" often face starvation and torture in a penal system many consider among the world's most repressive, said David Hawk, author of the 2004 study "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps."
(Los Angels Times. June 9, 2009)


ところで上記例文で、"gulag"という見慣れない単語が出てくるのですが、これはロシア語源で、”強制収用所”を指します。

Wikipediaによりますと、gulagとは元々労働刑を司るお役所名を表すロシア語の頭文字をとったものだったようですが、次第に労働刑そのものや刑が執行される場所を指すようになったのだそうです。