North Korea leads the world in the percentage of its population forced to work as slave labor, according to a report compiled by an Australian human rights organization, Walk Free.

Dedicated to campaigning against “modern slavery,” Walk Free in its newly released Global Slavery Index estimates that more than one out of ten — 2,696,000 of North Korea’s 25,779,000 people — are slaves. That number includes all those “forced to work by the state or risk being penalized with hard labor in prison camp.”

“The countries estimated to have the highest prevalence of modern slavery tend to be conflict-affected, have state-imposed forced labor, and have weak governance,” says the report, ranking Eritrea as second with nearly one in ten, with 90.3 of every 1,000 people, or 320,000 people, living in slavery.

The percentages for North Korea and Eritrea are by far the highest of any country, according to Walk Free, relying on its own research and that of the International Labor Organization and the International Organization for Migration. The report estimates the number of slaves worldwide at 50 million as of 2021.

Walk Free’s report, though, seeks to create an equivalence between what is going on in North Korea and judicial punishment in America. It does so by including in respect of America, a nation of some 330 million, the estimate that 1.1 million persons — the vast majority of whom are in prisons after conviction of crimes under American due process — or 0.33 percent of Americans, are “living in modern slavery.” 

The report, however, makes clear America ranks low in “prevalence” of what it counts as slavery — 122nd out of 160 nations. In America, involuntary servitude is specifically permitted in the Constitution. 

The 13th Amendment ordains that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall exist within the United States “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

The “Walk Free” report coincides with a report published by Asia Press, headquartered in Japan, of an increase in the numbers of North Koreans “facing poverty and suffering from malnutrition” while the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, invests heavily in nuclear warheads and missiles.

Since the start of May, Asia Press quotes a North Korean informant, “our neighborhood watch unit has suffered four deaths,” all from malnutrition. “There are a lot of people suffering from tuberculosis due to malnutrition,” says the informant, along with “a dramatic rise in wandering homeless people.”

The Asia Press report conjures images reminiscent of the mid-1990s when famine and disease killed approximately 2 million North Koreans.

Since April, “urban dwellers nationwide are mobilized to work on farms,” it says. “People are fighting with whatever they have to survive, but market commerce doesn’t make any money, and people are too weak to engage in wage labor. People are dying.”